skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've actually been having problems with my XPS m1330.

Basically there is a design flaw on the top that causes a clicking right beside the right arrow key.

I've had almost everything replaced in this laptop, a replacement shipped out with a warped chassis and dead USB port and have spent HOURS dealing with Dell, in home support and reinstalling software.

Right now, I'm on a frankenstein that's had LCD, wrist rest, top plastic, dvd drive, cpu fan, heatpipe, and hard drive replaced.

Of course, there's nothing on the market that's under $1k that has all the features of this machine, so I'm either stuck paying more money or dealing with this jumble of hardware.
I think it is important to pay attention to the market in an effort to better understand who your core customers are and anticipate their future needs. In doing so, you create early opportunities to differentiate yourself which makes it easier to compete. It's not just about raw numbers and figures, often these figures don't exist yet in new markets.

RivalMap (previously Competitious) is an excellent tool that helps us organize and discuss market analysis in our startup. There is a free edition for 3 users and I think they are adding news soon too.
The Fabric of Reality - David Deutsch

Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hoftstadter

Karl Popper's books (too many to list)

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
I've been doing consulting for a few years (4+) and quit a few 9-5 jobs during that time. Frankly, consulting full time offers great pay and a boatload of flexibility. For a long time I went through firms and they ate 20-30% of my "profits" although they dealt with the billing and finding work, which is worth quite a bit. Lately I've been on my own though.

My startup activities are limited to at night (after the kid's in bed) and some time on weekends which does put a damper on things, but it also makes me more efficient and since I can think more (like when driving to a client) I tend to make less mistakes.

And I echo what aagha said, incorporate early. Some clients don't do 1099, only corp-to-corp. There are some tax benefits to an SCorp as well (you can take a salary which you pay employement tax for and then take distributions which are not employment taxed). I probably would have saved $30k over the last couple years if I'd incorporated rather than been 1099.
nickb is by far the most prolific submitter. many great article everyday are submitted by him, and users like him who use a bookmarklet to quickly add links from their RSS feed.

your method, while interesting, would put an end to users like him...

perhaps the games and such would be a better idea if they were related to a user's class. for instance if someone had stronger verbal skills, their submissions may have a higher weight, or something like that.
DHH: All code will eventually go stale.
If you don't have an idea burning a hole in your brain, and can pass up the extra income, at least for the moment, you might consider contributing to one or two open source projects.

It'll give you exposure to a new code base, earn you some community good-will, and be a genuine differentiator when you do go looking for that new startup/consulting/whatever gig.
It appears to be a Flash wrapper for PDF that breaks my keyboard shortcuts, scrolling (by either spacebar or mousewheel), zooming, and searching.

Is this an improvement on some platform, like Windows? Could you whitelist those platforms, instead of blacklisting iPhones?

I suppose I could have my browsers (on Mac and Linux) claim to be an iPhone for HN, but that seems like a silly hack.
For anyone working on neat side hardware projects
YouTube's new APIs open the site to external apps
I did GSoc for Freenet and hopefully will find more time to contribute to it.If money werent an issue,i would be working full time on the kernel and Freenet, but unfortunately it is :P
I tend to contribute to projects that benefit whatever else I'm working on at the time. If an open source project gets me half way to fulfilling a feature, I have no problem taking it the rest of the way and contributing back. It's better than starting from scratch!
Could we please have a break from 37signsls submissions?

Just a small one.

Please...
In my opinion, getting a big injection of VC money doesn't make it alright to turn up your burn rate a significant amount.

I have never been through a round of funding, but it would make sense to keep your costs down wherever possible. A founder who just got a round of funding should be thinking on ways to increase the value of the company instead of their salary.

I would like to know what is the norm in VC backed startups. Are there significant pay raises or bonuses after a round of funding? Do the founders and the employees share the wealth? Or are things kept fairly similar to the status quo.
And the point would be what?
"Silence on the Wire" by Michal Zalewski
looks like the GCD algorithm
Oh come on, you know that is an iPhone app waiting to happen. Coverflow search of the web on your iPhone! That's something people will want.
JavaScript is way more capable than people give it credit...

http://tlrobinson.net/misc/3d.html
I've been thinking about something like this forever. I think it could easily be the future of forum quoting!

For example, let's say you want to demonstrate that someone is being inconsistent in his argumentation spanning multiple pages in a forum topic. Well, would be great if you could go in "quoting mode" while writing a post, you could first highlight everything you want to quote by browsing the topic normally and highlighting what you want to show and then you can "pop the stack" and come back to writing the post (obviously this preserves everything you previously wrote) and the quotes would be there.

In fact, you could quote sources outside the site... and it could be used outside a forum context. The future of quoting, I'm telling you!
vedic mathematics offers similar numeric tomfoolery
This does not really help. Yes, they put in a huge amount of time and they do it right. OK, but really how do they do it? Nah, not for today.
If an acquiring company treats founding employees the same way it treats the other acquired employees, the founders are likely to run for the door the moment they legally can. Maybe that's OK as far as the acquiring company is concerned. Maybe not.
I can't say you're wrong, because it's all personal preference, but I guess those issues don't bother me as much. I copy and paste the errors and manipulate the text until I understand what's going on. This is cumbersome, and I wish the compiler would simply say "this has to be const," but it's not that smart. They should be that smart, and while I see that as a compiler problem, I understand it doesn't make a difference to the programmer who has to use it.

Binary size is a problem with heavily templatized libraries if debugging information is turned on; if not, there's no problem. I make heavy use of Boost.Spirit, and I saw my binary drop from 21MB to 3.7MB when I turned debugging information off.

And I guess API is just a matter of taste, although I do find myself making short wrapper functions for types of calls I make often. (Such as for_all as a wrapper to for_each on the .begin() and .end() of a container.)
In case anyone wants a simple way to take screenshots of webpages (on Ubuntu):

aptitude install xvfb xwd firefox netpbm

Xvfb :4 -screen 0 1024x1024x24 &
sleep 1
firefox --display=:4.0 -width 1024 -height 1024 &
sleep 10
firefox -remote "openURL(http://news.ycombinator.com/)"
sleep 5
xwd -root -silent -display :4.0 | xwdtopnm | pnmcut 1 125 800 600 | pnmtojpeg > screenshot.jpg

Of course these commands can be automated in your language of choice. The only problems: firefox opens a new tab by default, so you can't close old ones; and there's no way to find out when a page is done loading.
Orange data maining software. http://www.ailab.si/orange/
* "Applied Cryptography" by Bruce Schneier. The first chapters are a great introduction to cryptography, but I found the few following chapters presenting cryptographic protocols mind-blowing. Some of them are so simple yet very clever.

* Political economy essays by Frédéric Bastiat ( http://bastiat.org ) were truly enlightening for me.
Yes. Some ideas expressed in this book are really creative.
DHH will eventually go stale. I look forward to that day.
Crgslst: The Endangered, Sexy Craigslist Search Tool
Ways to generate brilliant ideas
The bowel movement: What is your poo telling you about your health?
cool idea, but first thing i tried is nytimes.com and it failed.
Ask Hackers: How to become the best JavaScript programmer? (q by 12yr old)
I love everything about the web and web 2.0 and I would love to become the best JavaScript programmer ever!

Can you give me hints and tips to become one?

PS. I am 12 years old
My personalized news site based on the book Programming Collective Intelligence
You should include your pay raises in your budget you provide VCs before closing your series A.

I would suggest paying yourself somewhere around or a bit above what you would make at a big company if you were doing the 9-5 gig as an engineer or whatever other position you'd hold.
This is a personalized news site that I wrote in two months based on algorithms from the book Programming Collective Intelligence. Please tell me what you think.

It has two main features: the ability to identify related /similar links and suggestions/recommendations that actually work.

The basis for all of the algorithms is a document similarity metric presented in Chapter 3: Discovering Groups. Basically, to compare document A with document B, we calculate the Pearson correlation coefficient between the word frequencies of document A and the word counts of document B. (You can imagine this as plotting a series of points of a graph: each point's x coordinate is its frequency in document A and each point's Y coordinate is its frequency in document B. The Pearson correlation coefficient is a measure of how well the line-of-best-fit fits the points.)

Using this similarity metric, links can be clustered together using K-means clustering. This is what you get when you click on “related” at the bottom of each link. Clicking on “similar” gives the results of running K-NN. (“related” doesn't work as well as it could be right now because there are too few links for a link to be similar with, but this is an example of where it does work: http://fyynd.com/links/197/related/ “similar” usually works better right now.)

There are two algorithms for giving recommendations, “Suggested” and “Recommended”. "Recommended" generally works better than Suggested when you haven't yet made votes but Suggested should be more in tune to your preferences in the long run.

In layman's terms, the Recommendation algorithm works by "averaging" together the links that you liked and then find links that are similar to that while the Suggestion algorithm tries to determine whether you will like a particular link by seeing whether it is similar to any page that you have already rated highly. As a result, "Recommended" will list pages in your general interest area, but insensitive to any "niche" interest that you might have. The "Suggested" page will be sensitive to "niche" interests but will requires more votes to train. For example, if most of the link you rate highly are about computer science, with a only a few links about biology, when the recommendation algorithm averages them together, the biology links would count for very little. As a result, you wouldn't see much on biology. On the other hand, the suggestion algorithm will not be hindered by this, though it will have trouble if you don't vote much.

Please note that because predictions are so computationally intensive, they are not updated in real-time but on a hourly basis. Thus, you have to wait a bit before they come out. Please be patient!

Please check it out and tell me what you think! Any questions/comments/suggestions are more than welcome!
1) Work on challenging problems. Try to do something you're not sure you can.

2) Find a good mentor - it could be a prof at a local university, family friend who is a hacker

3) Practice, practice, practice - write javascript to make stuff for fun.

4) Go to websites you like and de-construct their javascript code and figure out what it's doing.

5) Don't be shy to reach out for advice, like you're doing now.
P.S.: I forgot to mention: the voting system normalizes your ratings. Thus, if you vote all 5 stars it is same as not voting at all! You must tell it what you don't like as well as what you like.
Not to nitpick, but I wouldn't call that a marketing analysis. Marketing analysis is more like how big is the market segment? Who are the biggest players in the space, what are their products, and what are their weaknesses? These are questions you'll be asked by any VC (even though they usually know the answers). I managed to land my first round without knowing that data, but I looked bad because I didn't.

You get that kind of data from research companies like Forrester or Tower Group. They do reports on different market segments every so often and charge upwards of $10,000 just for a single copy of the report.

Startup Tip: If you have a friend at a big company or venture capital group, they may have access to their company's research subscription. If so, they could get you the report(s) for free.
i agree with that. just std::string alone has saved me from years of pain.
I started learning programming at 12 years old. An ideal year in my opinion. Experiment with everything you have the time to learn about. You may be surprised at what you can do with an otherwise bland tool or function.
Good advice. There's a balance between reaching out too much, and not reaching out enough. Almost everyone I know (myself included), errs on the side of not reaching out enough.

So, go ahead, cold-email someone. Say "hi" to the person sitting next to you on the subway. You just might meet someone interesting.
Thanks for all the suggestions and feedback guys. A lot of people are concerned with me saying market analysis versus industry analysis. I use 'market' analysis because I'm not exactly reinventing the wheel any less than I'm redefining how it's used and open up a new sector of the market.

I've bookmarked the links and will be reading them.
one of the commentors there mentioned how apple starts from the form and then works on the function. in others words, first think: "what do i want?" and then worry about "how do i do this?" to me that's obvious, but i realized most companies don't see it that way when i saw how crappy every single mp3 player except apple's was. as much as i don't like apple, they deserve where they're at right now thanks to other companies hiring and letting permanoobs design their crap

http://www.slideshare.net/dansaffer/gaming-the-web-using-the...
Actually, what I'd like to see is web-wide tagging and then let the tags evolve. For example, I'd like to be able to wrap anything in a web page with <tag name="?"></tag>

<tag name="phone">212 555 1963</tag>
Air Force Cyber Command General Answers Slashdot Questions
The first version of Yahoo may qualify I think.
"It's a completely new market," and "we have no current competitors" are usually looked upon with suspicion by sophisticated investors. It's rare to have a completely new market--Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook... they all had competitors and were going after a specific market.

Update: I'm not saying you haven't discovered a completely new market, just that it's very rare.
"Do you have" vs. "Do you want"
Read a good book about Javascript, like "Head First Javascript".

After you've finished reading it, learn what can Javascript libraries like Mootolols or JQuery can offer.

And of course: practice, practice and practice. Working in your own challenging projects is the best way to do that.

Enjoy it.
If getting people's attention means breaking the design of the site, disrupting natural UI progression then no. People wont pay any attention to your content (ex. porn on TechCrunch) and ads become self-defeating. hernan7 has the right idea, if the implementation was good and enhanced experience, why not.

Just be careful with how you do it..
I'm reading this book currently. A lot of it is covered in traditional AI courses in CS programs, but I like seeing the Pythonic representations of some of the concepts.

The site itself seems kind of neat, feels like you'd need to use it for a while to get it working well.
Nerve-tapping neckband allows 'telepathic' chat
We have an incredibly diverse community of people here. Using that kind of system would ostensibly create a disparity between users who have the capacity for such skill tests, and those who don't. We'd have a giant rift, lapses of communication and before you know it, HN will have turned into Reddit.

And I'm very certain if that happens I'll probably hurt myself.
Hacking implanted defibrillators: shockingly easy
give jquery a try:

http://jquery.com

Most fun javascript library ever.
Perhaps new 'market sector' is more appropriate? I plan to have a writeup of my idea done sometime by the end of next week so hopefully it will make a little more sense why I use the rhetoric I have. But I certainly understand what you're saying.
50 Weird Science Tidbits & Oddities (awesome)
I've contributed some icons to The Fedora Project in the past, but not nearly as much code related contributions.
I've been learning JavaScript myself, and I've been finding Douglas Crockford's site useful:

http://www.crockford.com/

(Note that to become the best JavaScript programmer ever, you'll probably have to pick up some other languages along the way. But JavaScript is both a good language to learn and a good language for learning, so it's not a bad idea to learn JavaScript really well first before learning others. Keep an open mind.)
Get Firebug and play with it. (You probably know this, but just in case...) Firebug is a Firefox plugin with a Console tab that lets you enter any Javascript you want and shows you what it evaluates to. If you type 2+2, it will say 4, and so on. It will also let you explore the internals of web pages and fiddle with them to learn how they work.

The best way, in fact the only way, to learn programming is to read and write a lot of code. An interactive environment like Firebug makes that easy. If I were you, I'd get myself a good Javascript book and type in the examples as I read them. Then I'd try modifying them to do cool things. Good luck!

Edit: when you get stuck, ask questions. I taught myself programming when I was your age and my biggest obstacle was not having anyone around who could help me when I got stuck. Nowadays that's not a problem since there are lots of people on the web who are happy to help.
The Power Of Change
SECRETS!!! We all have them, some people know, and alot people dont, we are mostly afraid of judgement, and people not liking us for what we are when they know some of things weve done. therefor i have founded, created and designed a website thats called The Power of Change, you can check it out on www.powerochange.com. people can login share the deepest darkest secrets anonymously without judgement, and get feedback from other people like us from their own experiences, this project will become successful, i am sure of it, i just need help to get it going, i need something big backing me up, so if i do get your help, im sure this site will become the project of centuries to come. Thank You.
Bringing Second Life To Life: Researchers Create Character With Reasoning Abilities of a Child
That reminds me how great the Cryptonomicon is. Normally I read it every 24 months, I am about due another read again.
Bill Gates said the same about Microsoft ten years ago. The only question is when. Apparentely though (hopefuly or not) the money they have will be buying time for them...
1. Become a great programmer: http://norvig.com/21-days.html

2. Then learn Javascript.
TED: Neuroanatomist explains her own stroke.
NSA shifts to e-mail, Web, data-mining dragnet
facebook v1.0 was coded in several days.
To see what people who are strong along some dimension think is interesting news. It also encourages people to play with the puzzle more.
Much respect to you, young coder! I avoided Javascript for far too long, but when I needed to learn it, the o'Reilly Javascript & DHTML cookbook was a great resource.

Firebug is nice, but Venkman's Javascript Debugger for FireFox is my favorite. The interface is a bit weird, but your mind should be flexible enough to figure it out. :)

Good luck!
MySQL co-founder, David Axmark, on Sun's billion dollar acquisition
launch.
The main difference between your idea and eRDF or RDFa is lack of namespaces. The "web-wide tagging" and "let the tagging evolve" bits are a huge part of RDF.
List of open problems in computer science
I'm surprised no one mentioned SICP.

I would also add:

- The Little Schemer
- Linux in a Nutshell
- Unix power tools
I really want to see some sort of iPhone open sauce apps (:
I haven't solved it yet, but it seems to be solvable by sheer diligence? Is there a faster solution? I think in an interview I would ask to write a computer program that solves it. Wait - I guess now I have to try that :-(

Edit: which programming language has good support for primes? I thought I saw one recently, but can't find it now.
How about to post to the front page, you have to sing one of the solos from Carmina Burana post it to youtube, and the best one gets the most points...
A take on the freemium business model, or is it just free-to-me?
I'd like to see something like this that overlays multiple people's highlights; the more people highlighting a section, the brighter that section gets.

It might help with arguments where nobody can even agree what the debate is actually about, or what the relevant points are.
1) The #1 secret to good JS is mastering crazy-yet-delicious object-orientated prototype madness. You won't get anywhere just learning how to write functions, but learning how to use prototyping well is a esoteric skill, so that's where Crockford comes in:

2) Check out the videos on http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/ There's 2.2gigs of them for you to digest. Crockfords are especially good, and will teach you good practices.

3) Use a framework like mootools to save you time on real projects. However, I advise against assuming these frameworks are "perfect"; they all have faults.

4) Don't copy other people too much - many JS devs, including me, are terrible programmers :-P

5) Learn JS by creating AJAX projects as it's so important to web apps. "Professional Ajax" by Zakas is a decent place to start.

6) Enjoy it! JS is a fantastic language, and the quick returns can be incredibly rewarding. It has its faults, but it is amazingly powerful and quite unique.
Good luck man. I've been programming all my life and still love it. Javascript is a great language to dive into.

Always be working on a project. Come up with an idea, like tic-tac-toe and start hacking on it, until you are finished. Then cook up another idea and hack on it. Without an idea, you'll just float around. Get Firebug and learn to love jQuery, it's magic.

And if you want to be great, you don't want to be a programmer, you want to be a hacker. :)
I really like the interface. It has some features I wish HN had, like the ability to hide items from view. I've been meaning to write something like this for a while but never got around to it. Keep up the good work.

oh, please create a bookmarklet to let users submit stories while browsing, this is VERY IMPORTANT, and shouldn't take much effort (use the HN one as an example).

I'd like to feed the site with stories from here and create a Greasemonkey plugin to automatically rate items on your site when I vote them up here (if I can find a good way to vote up items programatically on fyynd).
I haven't read the whole thing, but another major point in the book is to subtly mimic the other person's body language.
Download files as the other party uploads them
Relativistic Asteroids: prepare to be blown away