skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sigh. Read up on how to use the Unix/Linux command line. I guess I take it for granted.

~ signifies your home directory, thus ~/.profile is in your home directory, which is the default directory all Terminals start in.

"nano" is a simple command line based text editor. Try "nano ~/.profile"

Or use the "open" command to open it in a GUI text editor like TextEdit: "open -a TextEdit ~/.profile" (replace TextEdit with the name of your favorite text editor)

Honestly, if you can't figure this out then I don't think MacPorts will be very useful to you. And I don't think Hacker News is the place to get this kind of support.
Thanks! That's great that you're in LA. It would be cool to meet up with someone from news.YC. My email is dkokelley at gmail dot com, or you could go with danny@cocunderground.com. What part of Los Angeles are you in? I'm up at the northern end, in Santa Clarita (at the 5 and 14 freeway).
Hold on, I'm running outa juice, got to put on my power tie!
This also isn't a place to be elitist.
How big would the Earth by relative to the size of the internet?
If the internet was the universe, and the earth was measured in bytes, how many bytes would the earth be relative to the size of the universe?
so what's the status of your idea since that time? do you have a demo? :)
for me it was also:

chown someuser .*

I thought I was changing owner of a hidden file .htaccess but of course .* also means everyting under root folder :)
I like this question. It makes me go back and think about the different mistakes and other low points, and go over how I learned (hopefully) from them.

I've had my share of cowboy-style recklessness with hard drive partitions. That's always calming in a strange way because it forced me to clean out those files that I was sure I could find a use for eventually.

A more recent mistake involves building websites for family members without a clear contract. I find myself spending more time adding features and doing tech support than I hoped for, and if I calculate the amount of time I spent and compare it to the money I'll make... well let's just say I was making more as an assistant manager at a pet store.
nerds/geeks/hackers don't click on ads.
Great job on the design and keeping it going at a quick pace. You'll definitely get some people addicted. The distribution model is clearly a winner. Good job, Addhers ;-)
Get a travel visa and a sham marriage. As the spouse of a US citizen, you are entitled to a nonimmigrant visa while you wait to be processed to become a permanent resident. Then, you can apply for citizenship.

Actually, your best bet would probably be to send out a boat load of emails to half the valley explaining your situation and see if any will hire you. You can come in for interviews on a regular travel visa. Then, whoever you're working for just has to fill out some form and you can stay pretty much indefinitely as long as you're still employed and file an extension every two years.

http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.5af9bb95919f...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that looks like the YouOS startup. (http://www.youos.com).

But I think they got funding. Maybe it's a different group.
not even one byte. of course you can not have anyting smaller then a btye. so the internet is not as big as it shound be.
How software is designed at Wolfram
Make sure that they're shuffled first. Solving it will be a compulsion for some geeks.
What, no girls fanning you with palm fronds and a little chamber music quartet? :)
Hmm. Good point. But I do need to be productive at some point. Maybe if the question was expanded beyond "Ideal Office" I could include those.
Although an interesting essay, I find it a bit ironic that Orwell violates some of his own guidelines in it.

Let's face it, corporate-speak and government-speak sucks.

Writing can be a high bandwidth form of communication. You must write clearly and concisely to most efficiently transfer your ideas to the reader's mind.

If your reader doesn't understand what you've written, then you've failed at writing's primary purpose: communication.
I have a lot of my own stuff that uses sqlite. One day I learned that I could not indeed live (or at least boot) without it. It probably qualifies as one of the dumber things I've done - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=115577

What happened was I knew OSX came with sqlite3 but I didn't know some OSX system applications rely on it.

So one time I renamed the system's libsqlite3.dylib in order to debug a dyld problem and forgot to put it back. A few hours later I discovered my laptop wouldn't boot. Luckily I remembered what I did and was able to boot single-user and fix things.
Congrats. I like it.

I thought initially silly to not let men in, but now that i rethink it, its probably the right thing to do since women want to promote and men want to see hot chicks...
I was able to manage 3-4 hours sleep to be able to continue learning outside of my 9-5! My first week of doing this resulted in a onversation with my manager telling me to shape up or ship out. I was okay afterwards. The human body is a wonderful thing , it seems to adjust to whatever you throw at it!
Agreed. There's no law as far as I know that requires you to have an official office address. It just has to be somewhere that people can send mail to so you can receive it.

The only downside was that my business credit card offers got mixed in with my regular credit card offers.
Nice work, once again! Keep it up, Slava.
What do you mean? I think he means he _doesn't_ want to be employed.
I'll agree with the not rushing into work part. But I don't agree that you need to waste 4 years of your life on college. If you find it's not worth it for you: LEAVE. 4 years is a lot of time to waste, especially during your 20s.
Maybe just peel the stickers off and put them back so that it's not possible to solve. Should keep most people busy longer.
If I had to take a programming language on a deserted language I would just take Python, Emacs and IPython. I can't think of any single Python library that I just can't live without. If I have to I will rewrite anything not part of the standard.
Orwell violates some of his own guidelines in it

Do you have examples in mind? (He probably does, but I hadn't noticed anything blatant in previous reads.)
yea it would be nice to talk code and stuff. I'll email you my contact info. I'm in Santa Monica
unless its about nerds/geeks/hackers :)
Some place so boring I can do nothing but work all day everyday. As well as a full supply of water, gatorade, tea, crackers, pizza pops. A big desk, a pile of books, one or more whiteboards, my stereo/headphones, and of course my laptop.
Because of California's settled public policy in favor of competition, it is questionable whether any covenant not to compete which restrains a partner, member or director from engaging in a competing business that is not expressly authorized by statute or designed to protect a trade secret will be held enforceable in California. Moreover, because of this strong public policy, it is unlikely that a California court will apply the law of another state in interpreting a covenant not to compete based upon a contractual provision or the internal affairs doctrine. Therefore, caution must be exercised in California whenever attempting to limit a partner, member or director from entering into a competing business through a contract.

http://www.pircher.com/resources/article.php?i=329
I'm sure it would
"In the last few weeks I have literally had a few meetings every single day, in order to get the spec right, plus I sent dozens of emails per day."
that's what plan a (sham marriage) is for.

But as long as you find somebody to incorporate with, they can technically be your 'employer' for these purposes, I assume. Bear in mind that this is all a little shady and really the only other way without an in (fake wife/employer) is through the presumably arduous process of just straight up applying for citizenship. Otherwise, grad school? :\
i'd be game
The sham marriage is technically illegal, and vaguely dangerous. Though in fact it is indeed a common occurrence. You can, however, get a TN visa for part-time work, that is completely allowed. Also, the letter of the law seems to indicate that you're allowed to get a TN visa for a company you own partially, provided you don't have a controlling share (i'm not sure if this holds up in court, though). If it does, (i'd talk to an immigration lawyer to make sure), find three other Canadians, split a company equally, and nominate each others visas.
Since then, we switched gears to my current startup. I'd love to come back to it at some point. And I have a decent essay outlining the interface that I'll try and post here at some point.

Honestly, the closest thing I've seen to an interface that is what I wanted is the custom desktop environment on the EeePC. But it would need to be made rocksolid on a much bigger monitor for the market I intended.

My YC app was after YouOS was funded. If I was the CEO of YouOS, I would use their tech to make a product for the older computer user market. But I'm not the CEO of YouOS. The round I was rejected from was the one Blake Ross was admitted to for an idea similar to mine with a much more impressive sounding client/server technology. I don't think that helped my odds either.
I liked that there were a variety of stories... it gives you a sampling of how differently things work out. The RIM guy, for instance, sounds like an order of magnitude better engineer than some other people in the book. Others definitely got lucky because they were in the right place in the right time, and were smart enough to take advantage of it.
I'm going to lose karma points for this but I think this issue is really mostly just paranoia. Can someone tell me what the likelihood is that someone would sniff my password from the bits traveling in the series of tubes from the server to whatever mail service I use is? For the record, I've worked on an app that sent plaintext passwords because we thought it was useful to have a record of the password you used to register with us. We changed it pretty fast when a few disproportionately loud complaints came in, and nobody asked for it back, and I totally feel like if it makes users more comfortable that it's a good thing, but I still can't bring myself to consider plain text passwords in email a big negative. Anyone agree or am I alone? :)
If they can send it to you in email it means they are storing it as plain text. That means that if their database gets breached all the passwords are exposed. They should be storing a salted hash of the password.

Also, I don't agree that everyone uses the same password over and over. They are nice bookmarklets that can generate per-site passwords. I actually generate a new password for every site in my head.
"If they can send it to you in email it means they are storing it as plain text." That's not necessarily true - you can send it in the same request as the form submit that accepts it.
I kind of prefer desks instead of cubes and I'd really like a huge monitor that I can plug into my laptop. Plus, free food and drinks. :)
I'm not quite sure I get the long term goals. Is there something beyond people adding themselves as a promotional tool?

Also, there's a typo: when you click on "Click here to visit me" after voting, visit me is "vist me"
I think Connected Ventures has the greatest office in NYC, followed by SkinnyCorp in Chicago.

Slide is packed like sardines, and Facebook has no style.
I agree. "How to win friends..." is great, but "7 habits..."| sucks.
1. Good use of objects.
2. The use of CSS provides a good way for customizing look and feel without diving into source code so much.
What places is a book inconvenient?
The awesomeness of YC comes from the fame/experience of the founders. Adding people will dilute the awesomeness, thus lowering the overall success of YC companies... presumably.
Here is the factor for Earth vs. Universe

By approximate age: 3.017

By approximate diameter, using the distance light travels over the approximate age of the universe compared to the known diameter of earth: 10,172,030,097,215,335,227.548

By approximate amount of energy would probably be more telling; it's telling me I need bignums.

Edit: I found this page http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-inf...

It's from 2002 so it's dated but, taking the diameter factor from above the earth would be 0.05 bytes, or, less than half a bit... in 2002.

I quit math.
I knew an Italian dude that had a fake marriage in order to stay the US - he was a video game programmer making 100K+ in the early 90ies, but didn't have a college degree, so obviously wasn't qualified or some such tripe. He said that they are pretty thorough in their investigations of your marriage, especially if there are no kids.

If it were me in charge, the customs/immigration/etc folks would be the first ones up against the wall:-)
Well, you'd have to estimate how large the internet is, not how large the "Universe" is. How much storage is on servers, etc?

Could even go as far as saying private networks are black matter :)
Tonight on Rigel News "Distant Planet 'Earth' reduces Milky Way to the size of an atom" more at 11

Has anyone read Our Final Hour by Martin Rees - he talks about this as being one of the possible ways mankind may accidentally destroy itself.
Duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=97521
The prevailing wisdom around these parts is that, while hackers do need someone with business sense to build a business well, hackers are basically smart enough to acquire said experience. Having both the skill to build something and the wisdom to know what to build in the mind of a single person is much stronger than having 'business people' and 'developers'. Also, YC is less concerned with developers in general; they pretty much have the pick of a self selected lot that's already pretty entrepreneurial, so adding a business person to the mix doesn't really tend to help all that much.
"... i'll take a desk or a cube with a brick alley view where i can sit whenever i want to ..."

I'll agree with the place you can sit anytime. But views are important, to me. I'm not sure why but having something natural to look somehow improves my thinking ~ http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/1270954109/
Just found this: http://www.naftatnlawyer.com/nafta-tn-blog/2008/1/14/tn-visa... << Looks like "controlling" doesn't just refer to shares.
Is there a tipping point where the increased multimedia power of flash overpowers the accessibility of javascript? We're powering though some pretty serious technical hurdles to get what we're working (which has highly graphical components) on running in pure javascript.

Seeing what Heroku has done has encouraged us to keep going, but we wonder if picking pure javascript really was the wisest choice.
In theory, it all depends on the public value of the stuff the password is supposed to protect and the uniqueness of the password.

Unfortunately the general populace frequently uses the same password for everything so if someone can get the password for their online suduku preferences, there's a chance the same password will work other places.

You may not think that matters much, but you're probably doing some fraction of your users a favor by not making things worse for them.
Yes, that's what Fred works. I have a different situation, where I had a fulltime software job, but when I was ready to leave, they offered to keep me at 20 hrs/wk, supporting me enough to put the rest into the startup. That opportunity to work part-time is a great opportunity, and a big benefit of being a founder of that first company and staying there for many years.
This is my startup setup. We have arcade games and every employee is given a 30 tokens a week to use on vending machines, air hockey, pool table and other games. It's their choice to use them all at once or spread out over the week. They can even hoard them and save them up. That way they are in charge of their time. We even vote on new games to be added as we reach milestones.
The idea here is clearly whooshing over my head. I don't get why this is worth making.
Interesting; they have the clause 'as a matter of fact'.

What we're doing is we've actually founded a company (some americans are part of the company), but it's an actually entity, and the shares are split equally so nobody has a 'sole or primary' share of the stock or income.

Again, this seems to be legal, and we don't see anything wrong with what we're doing. But we do see that some things that would be quite dubious could slip by the laws as well, and that makes us wonder if our interpretation is correct.
daveungerer at google's free mail service
Nice work, I see this getting a lot of traction
Hmm interesting, did you ever look at moving on a J1? Or for that matter does anyone else reading have experience with J1 visas?
2 downsides are, you don't own the static ip address, and you have to get your own data and database backed up to S3 instead of the webhost handling backups.
I think you need to get some sort of legitimized sponsorship. I bet this is fairly complicated.
Yeah, whats the added value over HotOrNot? It's executed very well, but at its core it seems like a HotOrNot knockoff. Can someone explain it to me?
"the wisdom to know what to build in the mind of a single person is much stronger than having 'business people"

I completely agree. Infact I am a single person and can deal with both parts. But this idea is in conflict with what YC has said: "We're reluctant to accept one-person companies, though we have funded a couple."

my comment was from my perspective not a vc. Of course when I put efforts on the business side of things I feel I am as effective as doing the development. But as someone looking at a VC as an option instead of self funding, I think that I could reduce my efforts on the business side and do more on development.

The original comment was "we worry if we had a lot of money..." my question/comment was if more money is bad then offer more expertise.
that doesn't even make any sense. if they are awesome then bring in more awesome people. or do you think that too many awesome people would make yc less awesome.

"awesome" by the way your word not mine.
"... One with great colleagues that help, inspire, and challenge me. Everything else is optional. ..."

Do you need other people to give you the core motivation & challenge to get things done? Individualism is at the core of Startups. Individuals first, team second. Why? Because designing & building stuff is a pretty much a solitary task. Sure you can have a team to assemble the bits. But in the end it's really down to how well one individual does particular job, task. You will fail where individuals fail, regardless of help by other team members.

where failure is the norm an ideal office is not optional

The ideal workplace is an important concept for Startups. It's where you do your thinking and execute your ideas. Your thoughts are your product. The better the ideas, the better the product. Poor workplaces, no matter how good the team or individual is toxic to good thinking. A good workplace can be like wearing safety kit doing a dangerous job. It shields your thoughts from unwanted distractions. Filters the environment of distracting noise. It lets you get on with the job not having to stop, cough your lungs up, wipe the crap from your boiler suit every time you sit at your keyboard. Another concern. If you want to keep your co-workers, fellow hackers on the job, the office has to be close or a lot better than their own house. [0]

You have lots of hurdles in a Startup. An ideal, even good workplace is a core concern. It is not optional.

[0] This is a Phil Greenspun idea on building and keeping good engineering teams. There are a whole lot of good practical ideas here ~ http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing-softwar...
hey zach, this widget is just the start of what we are building. Our direction will be much clearer over the next few months. As is I would describe the current iteration of the site/widget as a link/photo exchange in the context of a hot or not game. The site generates a lot of traffic to our users myspace profiles and the analytics we provide them is pretty compelling. But to you (a clicker) its just a slick hot or not widget that links to girls myspace profiles. In fact go to the random voter widget and start surfing. If you like someone drop by their profile and say hi (and maybe add her). :)

http://www.addher.com/index.php?controller=randombattle
Think distribution. HotOrNot is a single site, which coincidentally just sold for $20 million. AddHer is distributed across all social networks. It's all about distribution, and as the AddHer team executes the rest of their plans (whatever those may be), they'll have millions of users at their fingertips.
I think they already do that. Those phrases on posters of politicians remind me a lot of the way I write my CV, inserting all the keywords that recruiters look for.

In fact, it probably would be easy to identify the best keywords for politics with Google Adwords, just see which ones get clicked the most?
5 Performance Tools for Linux
A friend of mine did this to work as a waitress for four months in SC. http://www.swap.ca/out_eng/destinations/usa_internship.aspx Apparently she found work after she had received the visa and didn't have to report it. I don't want to do anything shady though. I guess you can't sponsor yourself (or your co-founder) for a J1 either?!
Thank you, that helps. Interested to see where you're going with this.
love the design - great to see the standard menu of web 2.0 stuff (photo sharing) start to get a new twist

as people have pointed out the distributed approach could be v. powerful

big ups
4-6 hours. every week or two i get a night of 7 or 8 to catch up. can't say its the healthiest thing but i'm still productive. the more annoying part is that my hours are slowly shifting around i've been going to sleep at 10am sleeping till 2pm these days and its my second time all the way around 24 hour clock in the last 3 months :(
agreed. i was working co-op 9-6 then my startup 7-4am for 4 months. at first it was tough but once i adjusted no one at work noticed.
We're on Waiheke Island in New Zealand:

http://www.waihekeweek.co.nz/logo4.gif
The Queens Library at University of Bristol. So many stacks full of engineering knowledge..
The public library. Also the libraries of my local universities are cool, as they also admit strangers.
Even very simple text classification can get you somewhere. Last year a couple of economists, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro, published a wonderful paper in which they did something similar.

Take a look at it: http://home.uchicago.edu/~jmshapir/biasmeas052507_formatted....

"To measure news slant, we examine the set of all phrases used by members of Congress in the 2005 Congressional Record, and identify those that are used much more frequently by one party than by another. We then index newspapers by the extent to which the use of politically charged phrases in their news coverage resembles the use of the same phrases in the speech of a congressional Democrat or Republican."

They then go on to compare their index of politically-slanted language in newspapers to the politics of the newspapers' readers, and conclude that newspaper bias is driven more by readers wanting their own prejudices confirmed than by the politics of the newspaper owners.
It's a really great piece of work: worth reading in full if you have any interest in text classification politics.
Yes, I will be sharing -- once there's something to share. Before getting to that point, there's work which needs to be done on Xen, packaging up FreeBSD in such a way that EC2 can handle it, and getting FreeBSD and EC2 to handle each other's quirks sanely... so there's nothing to share so far, and no need for an empty website yet.
short answer. MEXICO...... j/k