skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wait a second. Just because most of these companies did not produce news and changed value does not show the market is irrational.

The price of stock can be affected by a lot of things, like the Fed interest rates, otehr stock prices, housing, etc.

If stockholders suddenly think they can get a better ROI on housing than in NASDAQ (not the case anymore, but bear with me) they'll take their money out of NASDAQ and put it in housing. Even if the NASDAQ companies did not change over the course of these events, their prices still dropped for a rational reason: investors could get a better deal elsewhere.

The NASDAQ might have dropped because the general economy looked bad, so US consumers might buy fewer goods from NASDAQ companies.
I love creating stuff, especially through programming. I almost started my own "Web 2.0" site while at university, but my study time eventually took over. Then, no longer funded by my parents, I needed a job. I worked for a games company which, one year later, was slowly draining the passion for coding out of me. So I quit, moved country (again) and now I'm living off savings and odd jobs while building a prototype and hunting for co-founders. Woo!
mkdir -p is really useful. If I have a script that needs to be a file in (security concerns aside)

/basedir/some/path/thats/not/there/

I can just do

mkdir -p /basedir/some/path/thats/not/there

and not worry about which of the lower level directories exist or not - it will just create them or not complain if they don't exist. Before I knew of the -p switch, I used to split up the whole path and check for/create each directory level in turn - while its not difficult, its not much fun either!
Net neutrality guru to speak at USF
This is a pretty cool site. I know a number of soccermoms who religiously check a crime blog for the neighborhood, they're also interested to know when a park or YMCA closes too, but I guess they'll have to program that themselves from an API.
The advertising market - Hard sell
Airwaves for sale
Note to self: If you're going to commit felony file deletion, make sure that you at least do a good enough job that the files aren't recoverable.
I want to work for myself, and with the right people (I'm always on the lookout), and I want to make things that don't suck.
The lucky 200
Because no other photo-sharing site does what I want.

http://ourdoings.com/2007-12-19
Imagine 2+ users, each wanting say, Verdana or not-Verdana, and each giving you a dollar each time you change it.
Agreed, I, too, had the feeling that he didn't get the algorithm. In fact, you have to compare every 5th position with all 5 letters of the pattern - p, e, n, 1 and s, (edit) or the other way around, like you said, which can be done nicely by using character sets like in Pascal or bitmaps in C++.

Which brings up a question whether this method is any better than, for example, the Intel x86 instruction for linearly scanning strings (the SCAS family, if I'm not mistaken).
Agree, it is not all black and white, and by no means simple. And that is the core of the problem. The markets are so complicated that noone really has any idea what will happen. The reason for this is that there are a large number of players influenced by each other, noone has an overview, and basically noone is at the helm steering the whole thing.

The reason I disagree with classical economics is that it very often gets things wrong, and can only predict major trends after they have happened - which is not much of a prediction.

I think that economists need to break away from the classical models and see the economy for what it is: a chaotic system. Start lookig at emergence, negative and positive feedback loops, etc.
If copyrights are a proper balance, everyone benefits, because more things are created. Without the ability to at least make a living by selling IP, lots of things we currently enjoy/find useful might not exist.

That of course is not to say that the balance is a good one right now, still, it's not just the producers that benefit, it's the public who gets access to things the producer creates because he/she has a means to make some money from it.
That really wasn't that bad as far as reddit goes. In spirit, he's somewhat correct: Mortgages are different in that the house is collateral. The things bought with credit card debt [1] are usually long gone before bankruptcy strikes. In some cases, a forfeited house could actually be a net gain for the bank when a person defaults. The big problem now is that people will be losing 400K houses on 600K loans.

[1] Or government debt.
I visited ourdoing, and I really liked it. Nice job!
"It is generally a good idea to enclose variable calls in double quotation marks". No, it's generally a good idea to learn what quotes do and use the appropriate kind when required. Else you're just adding noise to your code.

The backslashes aren't needed in listing 9 since the shell expects more input after `&&' or `||' and automatically switches to PS2.

Using xargs is more subtle than they suggest. If may kick off the given command multiple times. This would make a difference, e.g. `xargs wc' would give multiple totals.
I'm young and have nothing to lose.

I want to change the world (by making something people need).

I'm nerdy and think there is always a solution in technology. People just haven't found it yet.

I'll learn a lot.

I see through the veneer of "traditional" paths of employment.

PG says it all. I send this out regularly: http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html
But really, is that it? Are you in a startup for the money, or is there another motivation?
> How often will I need to make a directory structure that is several levels deep, but only one directory at each level?

When you want to put a file into a directory structure where theres several levels of directories to avoid one directory containing many files, e.g. com/ycombinator/news/foo.

> For someone who was trying to save a few keystrokes, instead of trying waste time getting the right field for awk, just use grep. Its easy, you can't mess it up, and unless the formatting really matters its the best option.

The FA shows grep fails because 'Dec' matches part of the filename instead of just on the date. awk's a worthy solution in that case and formatting of the output wasn't relevant to the point made.
Because I believe I've come up with a novel method of handling user participation in a relatively mature market; it's far stickier than many sites currently in the space, and avoids some of the issues that other 'unconventional' sites have.
Money is not a bad reason.

With money comes freedom in aspects of your life, you no longer would need to work a normal job to get by.
No, I'm not in it for the money. The money is a barometer of something else. If someone can make money in this business (not that hard to do), then something they wrote is successful at some level.

I can confidently say that 90% of the code I have ever had to maintain is total garbage. I am often stunned that it even runs and I used to wonder how it ever made it into production. (I don't wonder any more, now I know, hardly anyone QA's source code anymore.)

(Another example: Today I refactored 1200 lines of code that edits credit card numbers down to 46 lines, removing 4 bugs in the process. This has been running in production for 18 years. This is not a joke.)

I realize that what I see is not a random sample of all code. I never get to work on the good stuff; no one does - that's the whole point.

My work, OTOH, has been wildly received by my customers and users for many years. I love what I do and love providing value to others. I can't imagine doing anything else.

I am currently working on my ultimate start-up, one that produces so much value that no one ever has to put up with garbage like my OP. For some reason (my internal metaprogams or something), I am much more highly motivated by seeing someone else's garbage doing well and thinking, "I can do WAY better than that," instead of people saying, "That was good." I don't know why.

Also, it's my experience that most people do not see the possibilities for truly excellent software (present readers excluded, of course). They believe they have to put up with my previous example. I can't wait to show them otherwise.

My OP was somewhat in jest, but not really. I hope you now understand why. Thanks for asking.
The system is the solution

By Donald J. Boudreaux

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/colum...
After watching the hype bubble that surrounded java implode, could you really blame us for saying yes?
Nice, that's pretty cool.

Along with the M2-ATX power supply I think I may have just found the brains to power my robot project (which currently uses the guts of a laptop which seems to be dying)
Because I got tired of retirement after a year or so...

Because every evening before I fall asleep I ask myself "What have you built/learned today?" and when the answer is nothing for too long I go crazy.
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/07/get-famous-by-not-pr...

"Can programming make you rich? Well, let's figure it out: think of all the fantastically rich programmers you know. Not a very long list, is it? And did they get rich by virtue of being incredible programmers?"

"A startup that manages to get acquired doesn't have to have had great code; they simply had to either establish a lead in a new market, or put on a damn good road show."
I don't think it's a bad reason. But from what I see in this site, I don't think it's the main reason for most hackers to do what they do. That's why I ask.
Thanks a lot for your interesting reply. And: "I never get to work on the good stuff; no one does" is true most of the time if you don't do a startup, or work by your own way. Or maybe if you work in some cool lab?
If your wants and standard of living balloon, you'll always think you need more money to gain freedom.
Amazon Web Services Blog: AWS For Facebook Applications
Rails got hyped, sure, but consider the resources behind Rails, and behind Java. I'd guess there two or even more orders of magnitude difference. To me, that indicates that as much as there was some hype, there was also a lot of substance, because the guys pushing Rails just don't have the money to push it that far with nothing to show for it.
ejabberd: the Erlang Jabber/XMPP daemon
They should be out talking with these people, or meeting new people, face-to-face. If people need this app to manage relationships, they should be asking themselves why they can't manage relationships instead of asking how to manage them better. Don't get me wrong, I think what you did is great...just my two cents!
Mine says that she is jealous of my computer, that I spend more time with it than her, and she doesn't even let me use it at night when I could be sleeping next to her. She's going to kill it one day, I know it.
Politweets - All the News That's Fit to "Tweet"
Politweets - When Twitter gets political
Scoble Adds Ads (there's got to be a better way)
"...Since we are using MediaWiki for our web site..."

There you go.
I know professional bloggers have got to get paid, but I'd rather support them some other way than being bombarded by ads.
It's the most fun I could possibly have while working and I feel that I have a lot of power while doing it. Since I'm not rich, I've got to work so this is the natural choice.

Were money no issue then I might focus on some exciting programming/engineering projects that aren't as certain a way of making money but would certainly help change the world.
Introducing Factor
Stop JavaScript Memory Leaks in IE
Want to leave Facebook, but I check it everyday hoping some random girl will poke me!
Would You Pay $1 For A Feed?
Doing a startup is more pain, stress, and trouble than the alternatives. Unfortunately, after trying a majority of the attractive options, I found myself unable to work on anything else except in start ups and my own personal projects. Even if I had billions in the bank, I couldn't imagine myself deriving greater self-fulfillment than pushing myself to the limits in a start up environment.
Absolutely.

The key to getting freedom financially is living well below your means. That starts before you get rich, and has to continue at that point.

Money can either be a tool used by you to build freedom or dig yourself in a little hole.
This entire argument frustrates me. Let me just go on record as saying this is childish. Hype or fad is never a reason to use or abandon any programming language or framework. Rails is useful, period. It has an extremely broad community of libraries and plugings, and it makes developing applications CHEAP and FAST and, yes, even GOOD. That's why people use it - so they can start startups lightning fast, or compete with the bigger companies who are using heftier languages and frameworks.
Java is on a very short list of the world's most used programming languages. This strikes me as another case of "people overestimate a new technology's effect over the next five years and underestimate its effect over the next 10 years."

Java did not replace existing desktop software. But it took over most enterprise web server-side development and in the process helped to make most enterprise desktop software development irrelevant.

So, perhaps the initial hype did not play out exactly as expected. But the success of Java does suggest the level of hype was justified, if misdirected.
Agile User Experience: If you don't have a user, invent one of those too...
It's worth noting that the programmer who wrote this string-based numerical rounding procedure:

# round to one decimal place and

# separate into whole and fractional parts

parts = str(round(star_sum/num_raters, 1)).split('.')

whole = int(parts[0])

frac = int(parts[1])

if frac < 3:

___frac = 0

elif frac > 7:

___frac = 0

___whole += 1

else:

___frac = 5

# recombine for a star rating rounded to the half

stars = float(str(whole)+'.'+str(frac))

is running a pretty famous startup.
People were willing to pay $100 per hour for me (of which I got to keep about 20%) while I was working on projects I did not believe in, using a language I found completely unsuitable, using frameworks that were a configuration nightmare, while reading blogs for 30% of the time. And they were happy with me!

Now imagine how much happier I can be and how much more I can earn while working on projects I passionately believe in, using the most suitable language and framework I know. I'm working 2 or 3 times as much per week as I used to, but I don't mind.
I think you're over generalizing I don't listen to music so music IP does not seem to benefit me in any fashion. As to books Shakespeare freely coped from others works which breaks our concept of copyright and he lived without such protection. Yet he has been thought of as the greatest author the western world has ever known for a while.

In my option IP law does little to promote the creation of quality works instead it promotes churning out low quality crap because you must pay before you can view. IMO you could produce a much more effective system by limiting the High Definition version of a movie while not protecting a standard definition copy of a movie. Thus you could watch any movie for free but you would need to pay to see it in HD or in theaters.

You could do the same thing with books and movies. You're free to download a text file but if you want the pictures or fancy formatting you need to buy it. Ditto for low bit rate MP3 vs. lossless copies.
Please do tell.

(All motivators are appreciated.)
This was worth clicking on the link alone:

"You make what you measure. Merely measuring something regularly will help you to improve it. And not measuring it will almost guarantee failure."

Will try to think of ways to incorporate that in whatever I'm doing.
How to delete duplicate files
Are you tired of starting up your iPod and starting your playlist to find the same song playing over and over caused by duplicate files in your Itunes library or in windows media player? Here are a few tips to help.
People love to click on images. Install crazyEgg on your site and you'll see how incredibly often this happens
"The new intro classes are in Python, which you could argue has the immediate benefit of being used in the world outside of MIT."

Yep. They can tell incoming freshmen they can use Python when they get a job at Google. Something that was not true of Scheme.
A black OS X Leopard Terminal theme that is actually readable
Because I've always wanted to. I love software and the idea of creating innovative things that people want to use. Becoming a professor at a research university was one goal I achieved, and doing a startup is the other.

My situation: I'm 38, I saved up enough money to live on for a year with no other income, I quit my job, I have two kids, and my working wife is 110% supportive. As they say in the casinos, I am "all in".
I'm looking for co-founders too! I finished Uni last year, been working on prototype since. It isn't the money, it isn't proving other apps are bad; I'm just doing because I can't imagine doing anything else. I'm all consumed by the startup excitement!
I'm watching the Gilbert Strang linear algebra course to pick up enough for other classes I am taking. Saves me using up an entire semester for that (I have a tuition benefit which I am using to take one class for semester; so I can take Information Retrieval now instead of taking Linear Algebra and waiting until next Spring.).
Note to self: hard drives are not stone tablets. Back that shit up regularly.
Is Affiliate Marketing just a fad?
That code belongs to Leah Culver of Pownce.

http://leahculver.com/2007/04/19/star-ratings/
haha, these are great.

But he's going to be sued for that Thomas the Train ripoff...
lol, thanks.

Anyone who thinks they can do better than that should.
to make an impact on humanity
When I started using Java in 1996 - people looked at me funny and asked why I wasn't using C++. Everyone said Java was a fad and that it wouldn't scale.
I remember watching this back when it aired years ago -- jwz in action!
The best way yet to measure the implosion of the TV and radio industries
Another novel chess-like strategy game is called Arimaa.
Check that out for inspiration if you need it.
Probably like everyone else, I found this great because it gave me a way to think about something familiar in a different way. I'm use to thinking about XMPP as just an IM and presence protocol, used by applications that let humans to communicate with other humans. But I didn't take it one step further and think of it as a messaging service between machines, mostly because I was under the impression that polling problem was solved (by the likes of Comet).

By the same token, one should be able to run a "IMsite" over XMPP, analogous to a "web site" over HTTP. It's just that there currently is no "browser" for XMPP. If there were, you can technically send DOM updates or javascript (or whatever the browser can interpret) over XMPP. I imagine one should be able to take the mozilla engine and tack XMPP instead of HTTP in front (probably easier said than done).

That way we should be able to build browser apps that need near-real-time updates. The obvious one is chat. In fact, most of our XMPP clients are specialized to do that. Other applications are collaboration software, like a shared whiteboard (if sending SVG over XMPP would not be a bandwidth hog). Video lectures with auto advancing slides might be another one. Fleet tracking might be another. MMORPGs would also be easier to write on such a platform. It'd be interesting to see where this goes, or if something better comes along.
It was. And it didn't. Very few applications have been created in Java. Java stuck in the isolated server environment, but everything survives there, since servers are like zoos: easily controlled environment where animals get exactly what they need without losing body parts in the wild. You can build your own toy language and it will work perfectly fine on your server.
What is svchost.exe And Why Is It Running?
My impression was a bit different. It seems to me his thought process was:
I deduce consciousness is not a computable process.
Consciousness is a real physical process.
Quantum Mechanics may include processes that are not computable.
It is possible to have scientifically understandable processes that are not computable.
My deduction is not disproved by our current understanding of physics.

I think your reaction is reasonable. It seems to be a (well justified) conditioned response to "God of the gaps" arguments. I don't understand A therefore I need God to explain A. It is common now to see people replace God with Quantum Mechanics. I don't think that is the case with Penrose.
Presenting at DEMO: 12 Do's. 5 Don'ts.
1. Acquire knowledge;
2. Develop technology;
3. Have fun;
4. Maybe change people's lives for the best;
5. Maybe get rich.

Even if my startup proved to be an utter commercial failure, the 3 first points apply. I can't lose, I've already won! Of course I can win even bigger than now...

Those are my kinds of scenarios: a win for everyone and/or a success no matter what.
Unfortunately, the HTTP protocol supports redirects. Nice try, though.
"However some advocates of Domain Tasting say that perhaps no one will be able to serve the niche for some ads and no one will make money on the unserved ads."

Who cares if nobody's able to serve the "Poop in a Can(tm)" niche anymore?

I wouldn't mind if the "Get a free iPod!" "Press the Fart Button!" "Your computer might have viruses!" etc. "niches" weren't addressed anymore
The semantics of that are no different than a case statement. (Unless this is in a performace-critical loop, and you'd gain something though a compiler optimization of the case statement.) You're equating using case statement syntax to good programming? That's the best example you have of a "mess?" That makes me suspect that you don't think about programming at a very high level and that you like making largely arbitrary changes to code for (unacknowledged) ego-driven reasons.
So you created a living organism engineered to produce a specific molecule for an intended use?
> I imagine one should be able to take the mozilla engine and tack XMPP instead of HTTP in front (probably easier said than done).

Already done: http://dev.hyperstruct.net/xmpp4moz

It's really cool, it's a pity it doesn't get more attention. There used to be a whiteboard demo on that site somewhere.
kinda weird foundread just cut and pasted it without adding anything.

http://www.instigatorblog.com/how-do-you-prepare-for-present...
Ask YC: Any crawler experts out there?
Hi. Wondering if there are any crawler experts on here who can help me. We're wanting to create a crawler to visit some sites that have forms, lists of items and detail of items. They're all in the real estate market and we want to capture the properties and pull out the latest ones. I'm being told that we need to create a specific crawler for each site, but I was wondering if we could create a generic crawler that has some kind of plug-in or pattern matching file (that we build manually) for each site. Anyone who is super-skilled in this area - I'd appreciate some advice. We're using Python also. One caveat - I'm not the tech guy as I tried to program and failed, but I do understand what we need and have a very good understanding of technology, I'm just inept at taking my ideas and doing anything with them :)
I wanted efficient and secure remote backups, and nobody else was providing them.
the word penis now appears twice on the front page.