skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are right and my articulation of what I wanted to say was not politic. Point taken.
It's tradition in the Game industry to write a "Postmortem" after launch, telling your launch story.
Imagine if more startups were this open about their process-
Is Rails the Right Technology For Your Start-up?
Sorry JFred, I respectfully disagree with almost everything you have said here.

1. No! No! No! The only thing I remember from getting my MBA was, "A degree in business is a degree in nothing." Truer words were never spoken. Get into programming now. Do you really want to be Dilbert's PHB?

2. Never ever ever ever lie. About anything. To anyone. Ever. Enough said.

3. Titles are titular. In other words, meaningless. What you do matters. That's what other smart people will want to know about.

4. No! No! No! You have too much "education" already. Also see #1 above.

5. Your demonstrated performance (what you accomplish) establishes your reputation. Everything else is a smokescreen.

6. Gross generalization. For good hackers, everything is everywhere, with some things more concentrated in some places than others. Either pick where you want to live and find the best job there or find the best job anywhere and move there.

7. Being part of a large institution is the last thing I would want today. Too much small, smart, and nimble is happening now. Do you really want to take a chance at getting pigeon-holed for the next 10 years?

8. I have worked at 4 software companies, 0 hardware companies, and 83 everyplace elses. The worst 4 gigs were the software companies, by far. Imagine sitting in a cubicle for the next 18 months working on your 1.2% of Release 2.3.0.4. Hand me a razor blade please. "Everyplace else" is where "everything else" is happening.

8. Agreed. The best answer for you could be very different from everyone else.

9. There are many kinds of "rich" beyond money. One of the most important is doing what you love every day. You don't have to "believe" anyone, but listen and go with your gut.

Good luck!
How to Make Your Corporate Blog More Popular
Sit down and think about what your customers need. For example, if you are a plumber, instead of talking about your speedy service and special promotions all the time, try blogging about useful home maintenance tips, such as how homeowners can keep their pipes healthy or how to use a snake.
Imagine if more startups were this open about their process. I'd love to see Sergey write "What went right, What went wrong, and here's how we made it through"

We see this occasionally on the company's Blog, or in a book written years after launch, but I'd love to see a tradition like this catch on more widely.
Use cash.
byrenesreview basically answered below where he said at least half of hedge funds and traders use Excel. Thing is, hedge funds, quants in general will be way more likely to use real modelling software than everybody else, so byrne's experience of them using anything but Excel is skewed.

In I-banking, Private Equity, management consulting, the financial industry generally, Excel is king. If you look at BankersBall they have a tab for excel tricks. Dealmaven got bought for $14m recently, and their product (apart from the bootcamp, which obviously doesn't scale) was a financial modelling package, or rather, training in modelling, along with macros, shortcuts and a manual for Excel, as it's used in finance (really very good training in modelling, as you'd expect from a firm with a Wharton prof on board)
As soon as I can use cash on the internet, I'd be happy to. Please note that PayPal does not count because the providers I deal with only accept actual credit cards.
Fair warning to Crazedlist.org (and everyone else):

Please do not ask me to switch browsers, change settings, or change my screen resolution. I have everything exactly the way I want them and will NEVER change any of them just to visit your site. I will click the back button never to return and continue the other million or so websites that respect my choices.

Thank you.

(This message is plain text and can be read by anyone anywhere using almost anything. What a concept.)
I see what you're saying, but there's a difference between being contrarian for the sake of it and being so for a reason.

Having a good why is the difference between Darwin and a Darwin-award candidate. Sometimes a best practice is best, sometimes it's just a practice.
If I understand the article correctly, what they're attempting isn't the Turing test. The bot will be interacting with people in Second Life, and they'll be hoping none of those people realise it's a bot. That's not the same as trying to fool someone who's actively comparing two avatars to see which acts less human.

Still, it's very impressive, assuming they're actually onto something.
More like: It's a tradition in Game Developer Magazine to solicit Postmortems from game developers. The articles on Gamasutra are from old GDM issues. I have a feeling that some of the games listed wouldn't have postmortems at all if GDM did not provide this free publicity.

It's interesting that the game industry is one of the few places where it is accepted (and even desirable) to publicly list the things that went wrong when developing a product.
I think is a great idea.

To disable the refer header in the browser is a good idea anyway, i guess its bad for sites that need user analytics
Google's "Do No Evil" motto has apparently jumped the shark...
Google Sky
Consider Citibank or HSBC. Both banks offer an international perspective.
I've been quite happy wit hteh geolite city database: http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecity

updating monthly is a bit of a pain, but no real complaints. i'd recommend using mod_geoip since it's written in c

also I use the binary format of the database as recommended by maxmind, but one cool thing i was able to do with the the csv version was import it into my db and then use sphinx to build a full text searchable index of worldwide cities
So the Unix Epoch ends in 2038... Is that the year Linux will finally be ready for the desktop (for the 34th time)?

Seriously though, what do you think computing will be like in 30 years? Hard for me to imagine, considering what I have experienced in the last 12 or so. Hopefully we won't run out of things to do by then.
Google may be displaced, says World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee
Yes, but that's a requirement to get around Craigslist's limitations (restrictions?). You're not doing it for Crazedlist's sake, you're doing it for Craigslist's sake.
Doesn't look hard to uninstall to me, and I'd say for the average user when they type something in the address bar, they meant to type it into google.

Seems like OpenDNS is fighting fire with more fire.
Never MySQL ; Solaris instead of Linux ; AOLserver instead of Apache and *AMP stack.
> what do you think computing will be like in 30 years?

Well I hope by then time_t will be 64-bit.
yep, wish I'd known that a few years ago. Ah, sweet experience, my favorite teacher!
I am reading this on my iPhone. I scrolled through 10 "pages" and didn't see any tips. All I learned was that google must hate apple.
Once I learned that database systemss are an application of relational calculus is when they became interesting to me and it's amazing to me now that nobody ever mentioned this to me during all the years I worked in industry with relational databases.
What makes Mathematics hard to learn?
1. Yes, provided his primary motivator is money. Of course, if he were really motivated by money before anything else, he's probably smart enough, by merit of getting a BA, to figure out where to board the gravy train.

2. If you're doing development work, you've probably been doing testing for years anyway. Saying that you've never tested anything extends to your own code, meaning you expect someone else to clean up your mistakes. Who has time for that sort of attitude?

3. If you let it. If you're a tester and want to be a developer, you'll get a lot farther toward that goal by not developing a false consciousness about your path limitations. A claim I would have no problem believing is that your past experience as a tester will make you a better developer. I was a tester at a small company for a little while before getting back into development. It taught me a lot.

4. Go to grad school because you love the topic, want to understand it deeper. If it's really just about the money, there are quicker, cheaper ways to get it.

5. Agree with this, except it's more about what you did than where you were.

7. What the hell is this about Al-Qaeda membership? Are you for real?

8. Yeah, knowing/learning the business is a good call. Knowing/learning the needs of the company is a good call, too. But really, assuming an pre-established pecking order for employees based on the "type" of company, in a very general sense, seems a bit premature. Also, just because your at the top of the totem pole doesn't absolve you of learning about the business or their needs, because being a "software person" doesn't mean you know their software.

8. This is correct, to a point. There is high-level advice that provides some useful guidance to everyone. I get the impression this is the sort of advice he was reaching for first.

Btw, best of luck to you, eznet.
I know it's old (50 days), but I discovered the "the story of stuff" only recently, and I felt compelled to write a line or two, as I didn't agree with the existing comments thread.
The problem is that the third party you refer to has the legal authority to affect what happens to you. It is a different matter entirely, in that case.
I've been through a few jobs in the last few years, and I keep looking back at them thinking "What an idiot I was for doing X" (for many, many values of X). But then I realized that I hadn't really defined myself, my views on software and development, business, etc. I was like someone who could run, jump, do jumping jacks, etc, who went around saying "I want to do sports for a living". I had basic tools and skills, but no direction. It sounds a little embarrassing to say, but how else was I supposed to gain direction without going through different experiences?

If you're not sure what you want to do or what really drives you, don't be afraid to take a decent looking (but not necessarily dream-) job offer, stay a year or so, then go to another different type of company. Think of it as a slow, well compensated data collection process that will lead you to a better understanding. Sure it sounds lame when put next to the laser-focused entrepreneurial stories on HN, but so what? Do what's best for you (and your family - important consideration).

PS If you do that, don't forget to code and learn something completely different in your spare time. That push/pull helps you grow a lot faster and benefit both parts of your life. Right now I'm .Net by day, Lisp by night. How much more different can you get?
Yeah, I saw this a while back, and it kinda surprised me. How'd that happen? It didn't seem like JSON and YAML were working in concert. So far, I've liked using either one over XML. Saved me from much typing. As it is, it starts to JSON starts to look like lisp when you use it to send code to browser clients to execute.
Why Are Continuations So Confusing, and What Do They Really Do?
SALT - Semantically Annotated LaTeX
Harvard (Haaahvuhd): we might leak your personal information, but at least we never use dangling participles in sentences.
Actually, they don't. Neither the MapReduce nor nearly all items on Stroustrup's list fall under conventional definition of the "system programming". It is an established term that does not mean programming of a system. It is rather a synonym of the "OS development".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_programming
Nope, just being typically over-analytical. But I suspected that there are people that had written more well reasonsed versions of such. Noted for my list of people to look up. :-) I started reading my first business books since freshman accounting about a month ago.
Go for a beta launch and use that to prime your content base, to give you something to build on? Rope people into doing work!
JW FLV Player at
http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=jw_media_player

Prominent websites that utilizes the JW FLV Player for streaming mp3's, HypeMachine (hypem.com).
IPhone 2.0 Firmware Jailbroken Already
Vim : a blank screen or maybe just lines of "~"
Didn't he say that last decade too? I'm pretty sure I still have that book...
Programming isn't rocket science...there are elegant ways to solve problems and brute force methods, but in the end the only thing that matters is that it works and the client is happy. There isn't much they will teach you in school that will really make you that much "better".

The biggest difference between school and work for me was the process and the environment. Some of the big things I saw:
* version control and development process
* rapid bug fixes and changes
* managing your own ego
* testing your own code
* working in teams, dealing with other people's code

These things are almost impossible to learn on your own. They are all things that can inherently only be learned in teams. Which I think is the big difference between school and your career...school is about you, your career will be about what you can produce with others. You need to find a project, anything, and get some experience working with a team (even a two person team). That's my two cents
Worry aboout having fun now and the money later. If you worry about the money now, you might end up chasing jobs with high pay and little future then you might get used to the money and the fun jobs will look too risky. But if you're having fun, learning new things the money will be there eventually because you'll be making yourself more and more valuable.

Here is a good post that I think should give you some specific answers to your questions:
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...
The tech world rejoices: A Congressman who can code
The really short answer is "how to code".

Forget technologies; forget grades. At best, they will get you in the door for an interview. They won't make your a productive employee.

If you can produce working, deployable software on your own, then you will succeed. Not that many people can, honestly. If you aren't sure if you can hack, then pick a problem and solve it. If at the end of a week you can give your software to someone else and have them use it successfully, you should be fine.

Everything else is fluff, and can be learned on the job. If you can hack, you'll do fine.
The Haunted Door - Would you have figured it out?
Pluto and back, in less than a year
I've always had problems doing business internationally from US banks. EFT is ridiculously expensive in the states...and no one even knows what a SWIFT code is at every bank I've ever used (I don't know what they are either, but I know they're supposed to make funds transfers easier and faster...but they just mean the local banker spends a half hour on the phone talking to someone in NY trying to figure out how to deal with the SWIFT code). This is an area (banking in general, not just EFT) that I think subtly raises the friction on US companies doing business internationally that I suspect European companies don't have to deal with. One of many straws that eventually leads to Europe being a better place for business than the US.

I've yet to find a bank that I really like for business, and I've been through several. Local ones, paradoxically, seem to actually provide better service and less nuisance fees, but they have other problems.
Ask YC: Supply & Demand for Startups
This is a bit of a devil's advocate thought, so bear with me. As the cost of starting up plummet to negligible levels, are we creating conditions for prices to follow? In an efficient, competitive market, that's what would happen. I noticed we are on to 1-2 start-ups a week from YC alone (which scares me a bit!)
Want to pay me $249 to read your blog? :)

On a more serious note, the average facebook user spends more time on facebook (and views more pages, ads, etc) than the average reader spends on your blog.
How to Fly Without ID and Skip Lines
the 'surface computer' is pretty cool http://www.news.com/1606-2-6186146.html

it makes me wonder what sorts of things will be possible with a 'space computer'
The Google Way: Give Engineers Room
Is this actually a first? I was under the impression that Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) also has some basic geek skills. I might be wrong though.
Here's what I did, and it worked out really well for me (I made $68 / hr last year, 3 years out of undergraduate). I got a job that paid a miserly $30,000 / yr at first, but it was a small company and I got tons of experience. I was in way over my head at first as you can probably guess from reading everybody else's posts. But I worked and learned hard, and after that it was a piece of cake.

If you are like me, I only wrote a couple of thousand of lines of code in college. I'm up to somewhere around 150,000 now, and I feel proportionally more confident and capable. I just scored an internship at Google actually.

Then my only problem was that I got bored, so I'm spending all that money on a masters degree, which I am thoroughly enjoying.
Agile / Lean OR Common Sense and Permission To Change?
Reading, Writing ... And Engineering
See Bill Gates previous comments: http://www.danielsen.com/jokes/BillGatesquotes.txt
I don't think this is all that outside the norm, but I might be showing my age. Both my co-founder and I are exclusively vim users, and at a previous software dev shop I spent a few years doing contract work for there were several emacs (which I don't consider in the same vein as Eclipse and VS or whatever--though it depends on how you use it) users, a nedit user, and a couple of other users of plain old text editors. And all of them used the same set of custom build scripts and development tools, which were all command line with matched sets for Linux and Windows.

Only about 40% or so used a big IDE (Eclipse or Microsoft's stuff, plus a few IntelliJ) full time. A few more used Microsoft's stuff for the debugger when they needed it.
Part of your question supplies the answer. True, costs may be becoming more managable, and resources becoming more abundant, but as that happens you start to run into issues with market saturation causing not just problems with supply but with demand.

Economists and sociologists alike have long preached to the choir that too much of one thing in a society can be bad for the big picture. Take for example the problem with American Obeisity. The more buffet items a restaurant displays, the more a person is likely to eat while negatively effecting their health overall.

Make the parallel to these startups, social content sites are now a dime a dozen, feed aggregators are everywhere (so much so that there are even aggregators that aggregate other aggregators) and consumers find themselves overwhelmed with the choices they have to make when selecting the simplest problem they need to address. When this happens, people often opt not to do anything and would prefer a direct fix through another means than to go and experiment with what's new on the market. This is essentially why you see very few startups aimed to address corporate interests where obviously the potential to make money lies, but instead targets a much smaller sector of the market (37Signals for example).

All of that said, prices and income potential for the startup in my opinion is coming very close to reaching a stalemate, while supplies continue to grow, demand is going to drop.
It's still very much in the minority. You're just running with an oddball crowd here at HN. If you look at projects being released and sites being launched, PHP is still the most popular by an order of magnitude, with Ruby and Python gaining. So, don't worry, you're still a lisp weenie hanging out with the long-haired weirdos and art fags at lunch.
Epoch fail.
Yeah I was at work and I needed to dig into some old files to find it, here we go:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://j.maxmind.com/app/geoip.js"></script>

<script type="text/javascript">
var country = geoip_country_name();
var state = geoip_region();
alert("State: "+state);
</script>
What OpenDNS is doing is far more pernicious than what Dell did. You can remove Dell's software and still use your computer. If you're making the mistake of relying on OpenDNS, there's little you can do to avoid their proxy.

You'd want to say this is a horrible precedent, but it's not unprecedented --- it's exactly what Verisign tried to pull on us a few years back.
I'm really impressed by their customer service.

I got a 404 from the site when applying to a company (they were probably overloaded). A day later the cofounder contacted me apologizing and offering to send my resume directly. Awesome site.
Top Small Workplaces 2007
I did that with ExtJS (starting way back when it was first announced as YUIExt). I haven't been entirely happy with the manner in which it has matured, as it has bloated into a somewhat intimidating Java Swing feeling creature (which is both good and bad) that means the most comfortable way to develop is without any HTML at all--everything is built in JavaScript and data comes in via JSON. But now that I'm about to finish up the project that uses it, it's turned out pretty awesome.
Eclipse has pretty decent Emacs key bindings built-in (you just have to turn it on), and there's a decent plugin for vi users; you don't need to use the mouse (much) in Eclipse if you don't want to
Well, one classic example: IBM and the PC market (where standardization helped) vs. Apple and the Mac clones (where standardization almost wiped Apple out).

Here's some more theorizing: I think it would depend on how saturated the market was. If standardization would cause the market to grow such that a smaller percentage of a bigger market was larger than a large percentage of a small market, the company could still benefit from standardization, but they'd also have to diversify in that time so that when saturation approached that they wouldn't get stuck in a commodity market while their competitors could catch up.
= "start" on windows
Why are we bubbling up a year-old story?
Why Dont We Invent It Tomorrow?
Hey give the one up there a try. It should get your state right, I've never had any problems with it, although my testing has been limited to 12 trials...
I used AOLServer and OACS for Virtualmin's first website. I got over it. http://www.obsceneart.com/?p=6