skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was a MAD Magazine fan and in a Super Special issue in the early 90's they included BASIC program source code printed in the magazine. I sat down and typed the whole thing in line by line and printed a full-screen pic of Alfred. E. Neuman. That was why I started going through the BASIC manual at the age of 9 or 10. It took getting a job writing JSP/Servlets to get 'better', but still not 'good' 20 years on.
I learned programming from a book Make Your Own Video Games which was in the library of my (not so well off) Chicago public school. We didn't have a computer, but I found out you can simulate a BASIC program with graph paper. That was twenty-something years ago.

My trajectory as a programmer has gone from sucking lots to sucking less. I might get good someday.
Fixing stupidity, tagging plugins for the cakephp framework.
or get instant beans and rice that only needs boiling and simmering for 20 mins. can be had very cheaply in bulk. add spices, vegetables, and optionally meat and you have a very fast very healthy meal. cook in bulk and freeze in tupperware and you can make microwaveable instant meals that are dirt cheap and good for you.
Working on the new financial reporting requirements and preparing my financial courses startup.
The simple version is that they screwed up. Palm management thought that they had a full year after launch to roll out their developer program. They obviously miscalculated the importance of having a functional app store from the get-go.

To their credit, they ramped up pretty fast. Last September, they hired Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer (the Bespin guys) to run developer relations. Ben and Dion immediately restructured the developer program, and Palm had their big developer program rollout in December/January, six months after launch.

As of today, the 'App Catalog' is tiny but growing at a pretty good clip. They're at over 1500 apps right now, and are growing at around 20% a month. If they can survive another year, they should be up to Blackberry levels.
Nice artwork on the landing page!
I first played around with DOS on an 8088 back at school. I'd edit batch files and make it print out amusing things. Made a text adventure, self-replicating files etc. I then tried editing an exe file to change it, and realized it wasn't quite that simple. Later on, I found QBASIC and used it to write "real" programs, such as little animations and an alarm clock using the PC speaker. I learned some Pascal at school, which is where I found out about flow control structures and functions. Later on, as a teen, I played around a lot with Delphi, finally getting over the disappointment of not being able to edit .exe files that I had as a child. I made a lot of one-off programs I'd put on CDs with autorun as greeting cards and personal messages to friends. I later did a couple of months of VB at school, but didn't learn anything new compared to what I could already di with Delphi. I sneaked into the high school Java classes when I was in 8th grade, and thanks to a particularly tolerant teacher got to unofficially participate. I learned Java and C basics at university classes I took as part of a cooperation agreement between my high school and the local university. Later, officially in university, I took more Java classes and learned what I could of C++ on my own. I was fairly comfortable with C, but C++ was frustrating, because a lot of the complexity felt unnecessary. I stuck with Java for the most part. I wrote C++ and Java at a number of research assistant jobs, and learned bash script and awk on the side for one-off tasks. my first exposure to Python was when a student at a course I was TAing asked if they could submit work in Python. I accepted that, and learned a fair bit from dissecting that program. I didn't touch Python for a while after that. Later, at another job, I did C# one-off programs for psychological experiments. On the side, I was playing around with virtual reality and used Vizard, which is a 3d visualization package built on Python. I started playing around with Python seriously at that point. I now write mostly in Python, except for C and C++ bits for performance-dependent stuff and hardware interfacing (which I use from Python with ctypes.)

How long did getting good take? It's hard to say. I feel I've learned something from each of those experiences, and gotten better in the process. I'd say I've gotten to the level where I'm confident in my skills as a programmer within the last couple years, as I've seen meaningful things done with my code.
First hand: Scaling under load spikes with Rackspace Cloud Server
That reminds me of this guy who did a similar thing to get a Concorde flight - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/3204699.stm
Assuming you just want search for your users and you're not concerned about how it works Google may well do the job well enough. As long as everything you want to be searchable is public (not password protected) it works pretty well and only takes a few minutes to set up and embed in your site/app.

imo, go down this route if search isn't a core concern. Better to spend your time on whatever is core rather than tweaking with your search if that is peripheral.
A building thermal performance model written in Octave/MATLAB.
Just because social traditions are formed without conscious thought does not mean that they are without reason.

There is a large population that believes it is healthy to practice some restraint on the expression of human sexuality. They may not have a rational argument for believing so, but witnessing the dissolution of the family in the western world I wonder if traditional mores may be wiser than some of us think.

Some people with children desire to encourage them to have some reservation in their expression of sexuality, to resist the uninhibited style of our age. They hope to at least raise children that refrain from surfing porn with a handheld computer on a commuter train, fer chrissakes. And if Apple is willing to cater to their sensibilities, they will continue to earn their customers' money. It boils down to consumer preference and giving users what they want.
I got a 404.
Escrow, along with a good contract, is a great way to transfer a website. The buyer has to send the money to the escrow service. You know that they have the money to buy your site, and that it's been transferred to the escrow service, before you have to turn over the website. You transfer the domain to the buyer, then they allow the escrow service to transfer the funds to you.

The reason this protects you is that if the buyer tries to back out, the escrow service still has the money. You can provide proof that you transferred the website and they can release the funds to you.

The reason this protects the buyer is that you don't get access to his money until you've transferred the website to him.
We are in a transition between a Joomla plugin and rolling our own.
We all really hate the Joomla plugin.
Thought I'd give people a first hand look at dealing with this type of situation. Would really like to know how other people would have handled it.
awesome news! like pg said, anyone who has met him knows how smart, determined, and genuinely nice he is. certainly a very valuable and welcome addition to the yc camp and he's already helped our group a ton.
I gave up a day job to make a living from online income
This thread looks pretty crowded already, but I'll throw this in anyways.

I'm adding a few screenshots to my part of my team's presentation. We have a program review tomorrow (today).

My project: http://cusat.cornell.edu/violet/
Sounds interesting. Shoot me an e-mail with more about what you're working on?
Marriage and family therapy of new york
Mental health counseling & marriage and family therapy of New York is a collective of therapists in New York who work from a warm, collaborative framework. Affordable depression threapy in New York.
I have a webpage where I put questions (and their answers) if I notice people asking them a lot.

Sometimes the dumb solution works just fine. :-)
From the article: "So while VoIP might be cheaper and easier than other forms of voice calling, it may also be less secure."

Such bullshit! There is zero data in there leading to that conclusion. The article is about using selective packet delays and reorders to steganographically hide data. This has absolutely nothing to do with the security of the VoIP call itself.
Dude, you've got to get a reality check, you're not going to get really rich from developing a product for developers - it's certainly not worth divorcing for. Developers are cheap and used to free stuff.

Focus on business saas like 37signals and you'll be on the right track.
Unfortunately when you try a similar thing with Pepsi they refuse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc.
So, I transfer the domain name first and request the money from Escrow, then on receipt of the money I then transfer the website? I understand how I can proove the transfer of the domain name, but the actual website inc. source code and assets, this is the grey area for me.
building riak on a couple ubuntu 9.10 virtual servers. checking mem usage n 32bit vs 64bit for a new project. riak > node.js > jquery.
what if that's what it actually was?
Wait.. in the most typical case you are granted the option, not an option on a option. Thus if you actually exercise the option your not receiving the option of cashing out, your receiving very real shares in the company.

Was that not the case in your situation? I've seen some incredibly poor option deals (NQO options that exercised to non-registered shares spring to mind), but never the scenario you described.
This is why having somebody who has a lot of pull in the venture world is very important. The difference in negotiating leverage is incredible. I've been a part of deals that had no preferred stock and no liquidation preferences at all for the investing firms. Why? Because the guy on our side had done a lot of deals before and had a ton of leverage.

Having that guy on your board, and actively involved in the deals themselves is huge if your taking on institutional money.
But, again, we had Plan 9. It was great and went nowhere. We had Lisp machines, Smalltalk and Oberon. All of them insanely ahead of their (and perhaps our) time and insanely cool. I can see we couldn't make anything better than Unix. What makes me ashamed is that we should be able to do it and I can't quite grasp why.
2:30am and dare I say it .... progress!
A different kind of cloud storage - DIY
Build your own cloud from local disks and S3. More adapters coming.
Preparing for admissions interview.
The issue being actually accomplishing #3. As a founder I can't afford to give you a huge chunk of the company (lets say 10% all by yourself). So I give you and the other 4 employees each 5%. That is going to be diluted down to god knows how little by series C. Probably something in the range of 0.5%-1% in a lot of cases. Now your screwed either way.

The simple fact is, when investors are involved there is NEVER enough equity to go around.
I've not tried any of them myself, but the list in the article from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134301 seemed quite sensible.
While we're nit-picking, maxima is the plural. Wouldn't someone's creativity (singular) reach a maximum?
Backing out the latest changes we spent the week building because it "wasn't right".
Why is Climate Change Denial So Seductive
Michelin
Browse the full line of Michelin tires for cars, pickups, vans, and SUVs and find the right tires for your vehicle. Also offers a tire dealer locator, a tire buying guide, and information on tire care and tire safety.
I guess the first step would be to sell an ulocked phone that could be used outside the US. I understand carrier partners are important, but this was pretty boneheaded. When you build a CDMA phone, you don't have a plan-B.
There have been a lot of scams involving using an "escrow" service which is really just the scammer in disguise.
I assume this is done using the css :visited method?
I saw a test page using wikipedia instead. I will post here if I find it again.
Building a barebones game framework for HTML5 Canvas. Or at least, decoupling the reusable pieces of code from a game I've been building.
It was very worthwhile for me. The feedback I got on startup ideas was motivating.

It'd be great if others that attended could post here as well, if only to help me remember all the names!
the escrow service still has the money. You can provide proof that you transferred the website and they can release the funds to you.

Providing that it's a real escrow service, yes. But be careful, since "fake escrow service" is a common scam.
Computer Scientists Created the Parallel Programming Crisis
I've run TweetStats on EC2 for the past year using the great scalr.net to provision new instances.

It's expensive as heck (the smallest instance scalr allows is an EC2 large), but it works great.

Scalr monitors one of several stats you can specify (RAM, CPU, queue size, HTTP response) and will spin up instances (you can specify a max) as necessary.

Granted the app has to be built to support such multiple app servers, which may be easier in some cases than others.

Sounds like the cloud server was rather inconvenient, couldn't handle immediate load, and required your manual intervention. Always tough to predict traffic spikes from Twitter. ;)
I'm thinking its about time we dispense with the pretext of the patent altogether.

Big companies just give a bunch of money to the government and a union/cabal of elite lawyers. Later, if someone else comes up with a business plan that threatens their profits, they can just ask the government to put them out of business.

Whoever's put the most money in wins. Its like a giant ebay auction, but for the whole market.
Like the rest of the commenters I'd would like to see some more fine tuned testing as to why, added it to the backlog for attempting on our signup page so maybe I will get to post some interesting results in a couple of weeks.
5 Travel Lessons You Can Use at Home
For a long time, 1 in 6 20oz pepsi products had an instant win cap worth another soda free. If you held the bottle still enough at the right angle you could easily check the cap in the reflection on the soda. I don't think the savings over the years of free soda would be enough to cover my dentist bills though...
A raytracer as part of a class project.
From Tony Wright, a YC alum:

"Probably over 100 people came to the YC meetup in Seattle. Crazy success. Note to self: Hackers suck at RSVP'ing."
http://twitter.com/webwright/status/9666575618

I couldn't make it, unfortunately.
As part of writing my first Thunderbird addon, started in the way I usually do by doing a demo. Setting up the parallel dev profile was a little tedious and is not explained in the documentation. I wanted to get actual messages into the dev version (because I'll need them) and ended up flying blind (but correctly) by simply copying the right files from out of the default profile into dev.

The exercise itself was very fast - which was nice. There were a number of places where one could go subtly wrong and I managed to miss them all and at the first pass. Which was even more encouraging.

Now I have to grit my teeth a bit and dig into the Thunderbird API to accomplish my real goal. What I do now know is the landscape.
Try Scrivener.
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html
Because I hate crappy viral games that make tones of money, I should shut up and make a crappy viral game in hopes of making tones of money?

No thanks.

If you had just said "Shut up and make your own game" I could respect that sentiment even though it is quite rude and basically shuts me down from having an opinion which (strangely) I thought was one of my rights.

But suggesting that I start making viral games for Facebook after I go through the trouble of writing an article explaining that I hate those types of games is just stupid.
Moreover I have some plans to release some software.
But I will not tell you more about my ideas for it now
as someone might do it before me… :-)

That's a big big myth. Ideas are dime a dozen. What matters is execution. Hasn't this been advocated enough already?!
I would have thought that you would transfer everything once you know the money's in escrow. There's no point not to; the client shouldn't tell the escrow agent to release the funds until they have received everything, otherwise (from their point of view) you could hold them to ransom for the rest, or scarper with the money without delivering on the contract.
Ok but to what level should I do those things? Should I "only" drink Green Tea?
I think that this covers majority of funny movies.
> If your life really sucks, then you could say "well, it could get worse, look at those kids in haiti. I should be happy for what I have, and hey, my life doesn't suck that much in comparison. "

You're saying it like that's a bad thing ... I know people that have everything they ever wanted, and are still unhappy (including my parents).
Ask HN: best way to write a compiler?
Hi, startupgrrl here,
I need to write a compiler for my social media startup but the only experience I have writing compilers is a recursive descent compiler in haskell. I'd like to graduate to real tools to develop this compiler. I'm leaning toward Django, but I've heard good things about Hadoop, what do you suggest? Also, I've been experimenting with replacing the cold cathode in my LCD screen with higher power models (think flood lights, Paul Graham uses this all the time in his hyperbaric LISP hacking chamber) to help me stay awake during my late, lonely night hacking sessions, do you have any tips for burning the midnight oil?

Thanks!
Definitely look for the ones based on Dinosaur Comics.
A better database.
Just made a little jQuery plugin:

http://github.com/zef/jquery_form_toggle

It makes it easy to show and hide elements based on the state of a checkbox, radio button, or select menu.

Demo: http://madebykiwi.com/files/jquery_form_toggle/

I'd be surprised if there isn't something like this out there already, but I couldn't find one.

If you have a suggestion for a better name, I'd be happy to hear it.
Signals and Systems problem set http://mit.edu/6.003/S10/www/handouts/hw3.pdf
Google's 'post holiday' Caffeine shot still brewing - The Register
Coverscans, coverscans, coverscans.
Working on getting data to be more easily imported for http://graphbug.com
I don't follow the home page. The comparison has ticks for both Twitter Search and Snapbird
I would love to see more client-side javascript A/B frameworks like genetify (easy to embed into blogs, existing apps, etc).

Unfortunately that project doesn't look that active, but it's the best out there now.
Good luck... you are brave. I didn't realise web site flipping was still big business.
I guess I'm just nervous about transferring the domain and website to the buyer (who now has everything), whilst I still have (nothing) to wait for them to confirm to Escrow that the transaction was successful/as agreed, and then on Escrow to moderate, and release the funds. Would seem to me like I'm last in line, and if the buyer managed to find 'some' disagreement and is 'somehow' able to cancel the transaction process, then I could loose/have damage to the website's assets and have the difficulty in recovering the domain... maybe I'm just being nonsensical.
this is a good example of needing money to make money. When I was unemployed for a while I found myself in a death spiral where I didn't have enough liquid cash to take advantage of some money making opportunities that came along.
And if you are building some software try to partner with another guy whose has similar interests as that of you.

Don't do it alone it is bit hard.
nreece: I am already working on it and it is very close to be released :-)
Roridge: Thanks for your support pal!
Related story from two months ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=981433
Tuyển công nhân sản xuất
(LĐ) - Cty CP dây và cáp Thượng Đình tuyển 20 CN sản xuất, vận hành máy tạo sản phẩm dây và cáp điện, đóng gói, ghi chép mã số sản phẩm. Yêu cầu: Tốt nghiệp THPT trở lên, nhanh nhẹn, chăm chỉ, làm việc lâu dài.
rama_vadakattu: I am at the beginning of my career as a software releaser - currently I am better at website flipping and stock photography. But I believe I will partner when my project would be bigger :)
Designing OmniGraphSketcher for the iPad
Maybe in Poland(?)
It depends on what his goals are. I'm not sure hes trying to start up his own company, but maybe just wants a big enough business to support himself.
Obligatory TL;DR - "Count your blessings."

Really, the article conclusion seems that simple. (Though I'm not one to talk; I'm the brooding type.)
Escrow.com, I assume their service is okay?
10 Female Cartoon Characters You Wish Were Real
If you have fantasies over a particular cartoon character, it’s probably time to start taking your medication again. However, it is not unreasonable to say that certain female cartoon characters have an alluring charm to them that can make someone wonder what they would be like if they were real.
I learned programming in BASIC at age 10 when a computer-science-teacher uncle of mine explained how Super Mario worked. It was all a bit over my head but after about a week I was drawing some Mario-inspired shapes on the screen. The next big push came when I taught myself to do early CGI-based stuff: it was just so exciting to be able to share something with dozens (!) of people. If you define being good as "being able to pick up a new language in a few days" then yeah, I guess I'm good & I think that's a goal well worth pursuing. Picking up a new language will expose yourself to new constructs & practises, it trains your programming muscle. If you define good as "expert at programming task X" then, sadly, I am not very good. The best part about programming is that you never stop learning. That uncle of mine is now well into retirement and he's still programming microcontrollers for fun.
I believe it, but if I'm executing on something, I don't share the idea until it's strategically useful to do so.
PyCon 2010:What every developer should know about database scalability (video)
Lecture 1A | MIT 6.001 Structure and Interpretation, 1986
Quote Portal for iPhone is The Epitome of Simplicity and Brilliance
There is something to be said for a mobile app that can have you up and running within seconds. There are so many developers that spend all their time developing a new technology for their app, that the actual interface of the application all but gets forgotten. What they don’t realize is that they could have the most ground breaking invention in the world, but if people cannot figure out how to use the app, it is good for nothing.
The article's conclusion is not that simple. It compares a simple "count your blessings" approach to a "think about not having your blessings" approach. Their research shows the latter method works much better than the former.
Oracle busy removing all traces of Sun from the Internet
So... are you currently making money from those activities? Or just hoping to? Any advice for the rest of us?
It is a good business. You just have to find your own path to do it :)
Won't you also have the problem of desktop- and especially laptop-grade hardware not being designed for these usages? They tend to use cheaper, less resiliant hardware (for example HDD lifetimes)
This is more certainly not the first in the wild use!

What about http://www.mikeonads.com/2008/07/13/using-your-browser-url-h... from July 13th, 2008?
Why downvote me? I was asking if the website flipping is profitable in the Polish internet...since author says he is from Poland.
I want to earn more than in my day job. I believe that small projects can be done by my own (I hire some freelancers). If I will decide for any bigger project I will partner with somebody - especially if he will bring the idea :)
It is already profitable for me. But it was hard to work on it when I was in full time day job as I had not much time. Now I want to scale it to get a solid profit. My only problem till now was lack of time.