skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not so much optimise as prioritise. I don't think I have ever found an optimal solution.

My most recent laptop purchase had to allow me to carry it as part of my single item of hand baggage on Europe's low cost airlines - together with enough clothing and other personal stuff to last me a week - a tall order.

Thus weight was a severe limiting factor - but there was no point in having a machine that could not run my development tools and their supporting databases, internet servers etc.

So (as I said) weight was a fixed limit, I then prioritised screen resolution, RAM and finally processing power.
The screenshots need to be clickable to get a bigger version.

Looks ok, offhand, but what's the compelling reason to use this instead of something else that's already out there, like basecamp?
Well argued iPhone SDK critique (no whining)
A friend has used this facility for quite a while. It certainly raises the bar and reduces the chance of compromising an account but only in trivial cases and only if the user checks.
> Europe may not have fallen so much as that other places have risen.

Right. There are tons of cool things in tech (Linux, Python, Mysql, Qt/KDE, off the top of my head) and the sciences in Europe, just that there are more in the US.
From the article: When you think of Firewire, you really should just think of a cable coming directly out of your system's DRAM banks. That's basically all Firewire is.

Shouldn't DMA transfer only be initiated from inside a host? That's really scary.
Would you (pg) scale to 17486 startups, though?

Anyway, I loathe this waste of tax money.
Why Japan lost the mobile phone wars
Let me start by saying I use Macs, which shortens my set of options.

I write web server-side code. This means I run a web server, db and multiple browsers. I don't use an IDE. I need raw processing horsepower.

Paying for incremental processor speed is a waste of money. Get the slowest current generation processor you can. Paying for an extra 10-20 percent is a mistake.

RAM is king as modern OSs use it efficiently. Mysql can suck its datafiles into memory. Never forget RAM is 1000000x faster than disk.

Max it. 2G is a minimum. 4G is good. A soon as I can cram 16G into a machine, I'll try.

I could care less about the graphics subsystem. If I could buy a low power version of last years card, I would.

A fast drive is nice, but the money is better spent on more RAM. I don't think 5400 vs 7200 is enough. And you lose battery life.

Many of my criteria are designed to maximize my battery life. I love working untethered.

If I could, I would buy a machine that could use multiple batteries, like the old wallstreets and pismos. As is, a removeable battery is critical for long flights. Sorry Air.

The air travel point may be moot becauae the TSA does't want us carrying extra batteries.

Bus speed matters when it impacts RAM usage. I don't understand this well enough and so cargo cult myself into buying the Pro machines. If someone can convince me otherwise, I would love to save $1000 and get a consumer MacBook.

It had to be able to plug into a gigantic monitor when I am deskbound.

I used to want a PC card slot. I would jam in big memory card and use that as a external drive for DB files. Voila! Cheap SSD!

I with removeable media drives were themselves removeable. I use writeable DVDs for long term backups, but do not need the drive 95 percent of the time.

Finally, the most pixels I can carry and fit on my lap. I am a little guy. The 17" is too big to carry or fit. The weight of just over 5 lbs is what I have gotten used to and can tolerate.
First MySpace OpenSocial apps unveiled with very little fanfare
>The screenshots need to be clickable to get a bigger version.

Ah, should have thought of that. :)

>Looks ok, offhand, but what's the compelling reason to use this instead of something else that's already out there, like basecamp?

There are amny features which can be useful, and which basecamp lacks. It might be their business decision to not build those features, but those features can make this target a different subset of people for whom having the features is absolutely needed.
A free and easy way to test your Wi-Fi security
A Popcorn Primer To Business [video]
Microsoft getting into the platform as a service market in a rather major though stealthy way
Create, capture and sync your notes with Evernote on your Mac
As far as I can tell, socialthing! doesn't yet have RSS Feeds, something crucial to my intake of information. It's a real nifty service, with a lot of eyecandy, but Friend Feed takes the hat with it's features and service supports... for now.
Evernote Offers a Backup For Your Brain
The unreadably low-contrast font here on HN though, is worthless.
Maybe you should highlight those things somewhere?
Why your Flash website sucks
I like the look of some of these products that MS are working on but there is noway I am going to touch them until they become offical 1.1 releases.
CIOs Still Fear Web 2.0 for the Enterprise
There are numerous well paid professions where people are paid solely to come up with ideas. Like the poster said, the reputation of the idea creator is considered by the buyer/employer before the ideas are payed for.

So that quote is a little off.
Brought to mind "the hollow men" by T. S. Eliot:

http://mybanyantree.wordpress.com/2007/10/02/ts-eliots-the-h...
Americans used to be the world's most skillful entrepreneurs and managers...
Astronauts Prepare for Spacewalk to Assemble Giant Robot
10 steps to beginning to parsing with antlr
My thoughts about your questions:
1. Launch - its fine in its current state and you'll be able to get feedback.

2. I'd use PayPerPost, StumbleUpon, maybe Adwords...here's what YC users say: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=104627

3. For this question I'll refer to Chris Anderson http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?curre...

Side Note: I wish it had better time tracking - that way I could use it for my freelance web work.
With topics comes discussion... Suggestion for YC News
The vote-up button should be removed from the front page. If users had to read at least some discussion about the article, inaccurate stories may never be voted so highly...

example http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=136270

(sorry for english)
On day of Bear bailout, economy's cracks widen
The problem is much bigger than merely children's toys. In general, our society is progressively less imaginative, and merely consuming what we've inherited from our past. This is why a lot of entertainment is based around destruction: cutting humor, violent action/horror films, most video games, pop music (angry rock, gangsta rap).

The hacker community has an advantage here, since we are so used to using our minds. Games like nethack are entirely dependent upon the user being logical and having a good imagination.
Sort of a side story but hopefully illustrative of the problems in this space. A couple of months ago I started on a side project to do a game creation suite modelled on the Dvorak card game (a Nomic varient). This is a very small subset of what y'all are trying to do, but some similar problems.

The very brief summary of the game is that Dvorak is a very basic card game with each card created at the beginning of the game. In other words, custom game creation within limited parameters. If you want more on the ruleset google and go to the co.uk site. My idea was to take this in a 'Magic the Gathering' esque direction. Set up a basic model for combat, and have each card be taggable. Each tag would contain a function as a String (some extension of Rails's acts as taggable on steroids plugin and Raganwald's work on methods as Strings in Ruby). Consequently, any action could be custom defined in ruby code as a method and then attached to a card. The end user might not be proficient with Ruby but could create their own card set with the attributes/tags provided. I also had a basic attack/defend hitpoint system designed , never implemented.

Well, the short story is I found that from a design side this worked great. In fact, I used the same principles to make several card games and played them with friends locally (in Tokyo). But translating this concept into computer code was far too difficult and time consuming and with little or no upside. Doing anything even marginally visually satisfying w/ the GUI (esp. off Rails) is also no small undertaking.

Consequently, my advice in this space is to:

(1) Start small - single concept which could be expanded upon and preferably has some inherent profitability

(2) Extensively discuss the technical details w/ someone who knows their 'shit.' No offense poppy, but you don't seem to have done this and much of what you say seems impracticable.
Why would the age of celebrity end? High quality output becomes much easier, but the authorship is still difficult (and requires talent). Photoshop and Illustrator definitely changed the game in the design world, but there are still clear differences in talent.
I like the aim of your blog. I've noticed that in all subjects there are a few key ideas that everything revolves around, plus a few key results from these ideas. For some reason, the subjects are not organized around those points.

School would be so much easier and interesting if the subjects were organized better.

I think the bad organization is a consequence of school performance being measured by tests. It is much easier and quicker to merely memorize the formula and regurgitate than to really understand what is going on. Then the people who learned by parroting become teachers and are even less able to explain the crucial principles; resulting in a vicious cycle.
FringeDC Formal Meeting March 22nd at 1PM- Haskell Spectacular: XMonad, Zippers and More!
FringeDC is a group in Washington DC interested in Fringe Programming Languages (Lisp, Haskell, Erlang, Prolog, etc.) www.lisperati.com/fringedc.html

Our next meeting features Brent Yorgey, who is well known in the Haskell community and a contributor to XMonad. For those who don't know, XMonad (a purely functional windows manager) is often lauded (well, by me at least, but others as well :-) as a masterpiece in software engineering. It cleanly marries elegant functional programming code with the ugliest of uglies, the X Windows system. Brent will be giving an intro to Haskell and explain the nuts of bolts of extending XMonad. As an opener, Philip Fominykh will be giving an opening presentations on Zippers, an exotic purely functional data structure popular among Haskellers!

The Meeting is will be held on Saturday, March 22nd. It is hosted by Clark&Parsia, a developer of OWL/Semantic Web reasoning software in downtown DC. After the presentation, we'll grab some food nearby and talk programming languages.

Address:
926 N St NW Rear
Studio #1
Washington DC 20001
Google Map:http://clarkparsia.com/contact

-Conrad Barski, M.D. (cell 202 436 1388)

P.S. We're looking for someone to make a video of the meeting for the interwebs- Bring your camera if you want to help.
But I was only hungry for one marshmallow...
Hedge Fund Wizards: the problem with historical returns
You make a good point and we can see that the value of the idea increases geometrically as you move from one stage of development to the next.

A great idea described in a sentence is not "worthless" - after all it could be the nucleus of the next big thing - but it's still just a few words written down. Just not much there yet.

After experiment, refinement, iteration, failure, rebound from failure, small success, greater understanding of the problem, etc, etc, maybe an idea is worth something more tangible.

An idea described in a few words will never be more valuable than any other few words until you take it through a process of design, engineering, and overall refinement to actually realize any intrinsic potential.
People do what you reward them for doing.

If you pay them per hour, they will work a lot of hours.

If give them decent profit-sharing, they will work on making your company profitable.

If you pay them per widget made, they will make a lot of widgets.

If you give them an equity stake in the company, they will be invested in being able to cash out that equity.
Ask YC: When do you incorporate?
Hi YC, so I'm in the process of building a prototype of an idea I've had and I need to purchase some equipment to do this - probably about $3000 worth. Is it better to just use my own personal funds to do this as an individual or is there a significant benefit to incorporating? What state would you incorporate in as a software startup? I was thinking about MA, but CA and Delaware seem popular too - what do you think?
Measuring quality of work in a startup is equivalent to predicting in the future how much of a contribution some work is making on the outcome.

Conformance to rigid specifications is not the way to go.
I agree but trying to pin down what disconfirming data actually constitutes is very difficult. I like the idea though of deciding beforehand (probably when you are thinking most clearly) how you will define failure or success.
OH. MY. GOD!!!

Since when does something that's impossible in theory can be possible in practice?! Or maybe the theory is simply wrong?

This is certainly a game-changer.
Generatives
Bill Would Double Cap on H-1B Visas
Yeah, this guy got to stage 3, and nobody gives him credit:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel4/4236/1...

With ideas, it's take it to the finish line or die anonymous.

EDIT: 1 guy did give him credit, looking back on this is hilarious. Look at what the engine the guy was forced to use:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.search/brows...

Also note the extraordinary business vision of Dow Jones.
Stop agonizing--Get the MacBook. I love mine.

Add 4gb ram and firewire raid: developers dream.

It's got everything you want.

It's more durable than the MBP, but the number one reason the MB beats out the MBP? It won't toast your lap.
"Well, you need to trust the seller. When you buy a subscription to a magazine or newspaper, it's because you trust the editors not to shove crap at you once they have your money. At first, you build this trust through a track record."

According to some research I read here recently, geniuses that produce lots of great output also produce lots of not-so-great output.

So, having a streak of a couple free good ideas doesn't really tell much about the value of the next for-pay idea.

Also, because of the high subjectivity, lack of tangibility and prospect of easy money, I think such a "market" would be driven by hype and corruption in general.
Why not use html tables and 1 pixel images of various heights/widths?
Perhaps I access Mecha Image Of The Day ( http://www.miotd.com/ ) too frequently but my first thought was a giant space mecha. Am I the only one?
Administrative Debris  - Learning from Tufte
Not directly. But if I (a) worked on nothing else, (b) did it over 10 years, and (c) trained the earlier founders to help the later ones, I could just about manage it.
Obviously I'd choose whatever town was most SF-like. Suppose only 1/10 of the startups lived (a very conservative assumption). Don't you think a city with 1749 startups in it would feel like a startup hub?
Counter-IED companies to become acquisition targets | Homeland Security Market Research
The author is right: this is a problem with hedge funds, mutual funds, and really any sort of financial investment. I don't think there's any real way to solve it though. The author picks an unrealistically simplistic investment strategy for which his point is clear. But in reality, you can't determine the risk and reward for more complicated strategies, and requiring hedge funds to register and report their results would do nothing to separate the scammers from the serious managers.
Great Sinatra song, heres "Thats Life" on youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbqC1I2SxGM
My entire text was "roughly speaking" because it depends on the startup's context and the founders' knowledge and abilities. I'm not talking about book-long specifications, but for sure you should have some requirements on unit functionality and code quality. And the unit's value is not about predicting the future but derives from your sales plan. This is about a startup already in a situation when it hires employees, so they usually have some historic data on the market and their own performance to base their guesses on.
Quote:
MightyQuiz ...The site is very sticky: the average session lasts 8 minutes (or 19 questions). As a comparison, the founders claim that Slate has an average session length of 4:22 and Wired has 3:34.

Are 3-8 minute sessions any indication of success? My site gets over 10 minutes right now.
Hot Solar Photovoltaics | Market Research Analyst
OP, please mark title as video. Save a click for people at work without headphones.
>3. For this question I'll refer to Chris Anderson http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?curre....

Umm, is this not exactly what I am thinking, provide basic usage for free, charge for serious usage?

>Side Note: I wish it had better time tracking - that way I could use it for my freelance web work.

We are planning this feature, I think billable time can be an extremely useful feature.
Why I'm Done With Reddit - Could it happen here?
Good interview question
Given that yesterday was a Pi day (03/14), here's a good interview question:

Write Pi in a hex base

A written test version asks for 3 digits after the dot; in person interview version - for 2.

The question is really good because very few people have experience dealing with fractions in non-decimal base, so it forces them to really work on the answer. It also a very quick way to separate "hackers" from hackers :)
Blissful Ignorance: Less information makes for happier users
I have a MBP and leave it on my lap all the time. It does get warm, but never uncomfortable. If you are just surfing the web, working in textmate, running a webserver and/or a db it will stay pretty cool. If you decide to play some games or render some movies you should probably find a desk for best results.
I'd be interested in how it represents a pitch bend or slide.

Would it be a sequence of small individual notes or one note that moves up/down the screen?
Ideas are not worthless without execution.

They are just not worth much.
project group forming is a great idea, maybe that should be the first idea we collaborate on. Virtual incubator of sorts.
I never understand these types of questions, is that really important to job function?
Maybe ask them to do it in octal too? Or just use a random number as the base, how about base 47? Will that weed out the slackers?
I dont have any problems when flying and carrying an extra battery for my Macbook Pro. I keep it in my bag, the TSA hasn't said anything yet. Though if i carried 12 extra batteries, they might say something.

The 5400rpm vs 7200rpm makes a difference. Not as much as working in the ram instead of swapping, but there is a difference in performance. Whether you need it or not is another story. Though maxing your ram out is always a good thing to do regardless.

There isn't much of a difference from 2.4 to 2.5 or 2.6GHz, though there is a huge one from 2.1GHz (Base Macbook) to 2.6GHz (BTO Macbook Pro). That makes a huge difference. Even 'only' 10% more is huge when it comes down to rendering or compiling things. The less time you have to sit around waiting for it to render/load/compile, the more time you can spend doing work or the quicker you can get your work done.
I incorporated right away so that I could write off big chunks of my day-to-day expenses. I write off a big chunk of my rent and most of my meals that I go out to eat.
I like this way of thinking about it. It makes intuitive sense to me.

It reframes the problem. It's about finding the optimal combination of executing team and idea, rather than about separating the value of the idea from its execution.
It tests the level of basic CS education. So it is an important to a job function if one is hiring a computer programmer as opposed to a php hacker or similar.
If you're going to take an investment, you should consider Delaware C Corp.
I have one more idea to put in.

As a developer I always liked to have a slow machine. That makes sure you optimize your software and the user experience will be great.

This also means that you can live with the cheaper consumer lines. While my first mac was a iBook (blueberry), I bought powerbooks ever since. But I was never as happy with the powerbooks as I was with the iBook (except the Pismo perhaps - that was indeed the greatest machine ever). Currently I use a Titanium Powerbook with 1 GHz.

My next purchase will be a Macbook, no doubt. Battery life is critical and also durability and finally weight. If you are on a budget, the macbooks also give you more security: if one breaks down, you can buy a second one (apples repair times are longer thana busy deveolper can afford to wait). Two macbooks are cheaper than one pro.
If you're just prototyping something for yourself I'm not sure it matters. The major reasons to be a corporation are:

* You have assets that you want to shield from liability when your customers sue you -- you'd rather have them sue the corporation instead. But, no customers yet = no problem yet. Assuming that your new idea doesn't involve radioactivity or anything.

* You want to give away shares in your new business to angel investors, VCs, or partners. No investors = no problem.

In any case, if you really think you want to form a corp you should talk to an accountant, and possibly a lawyer, about the details.
That's a good point. I thought about it some more, I think we would end up with trusted idea 'editors'. Folks with no reputation would be forced to go to these high-reputation editors to resell ideas. These editors would gain reputation for their excellent judgement of ideas which they publish and sell.

I think you're right though, good ideas don't come from people with a few consistently good ideas, they come from people with thousands of ideas and the right filters in place.
Effectively, what you're saying is "fuzzy" ideas have low value, and we would end up with market for full business plans.
"Ideas are not worthless."

Yes they are. They only become valuable when you work on them and make them into something people find useful. You can have a brilliant idea and watch it die on poor implementation and marketing, and a crumby one and make [m|b]illions from it. What's kind of fun and surprising about the Web 2.0 phenomenon is watching apparently weak ideas taking on a life of their own and becoming something interesting and useful.

Anyway, regardless of the merit of an idea in itself, can we all agree it's getting a bit tedious when people come to YC news and say "I've got a fabulous idea but no programming skills and I'd like to know where to take it. BTW, I won't tell you what it is"? I'd characterise that as attention seeking or border-line trolling.