skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Excellent point. Perhaps slightly tangential, but my advisor recently mentioned (and I agree with him) that one's presentation (spoken and written) often serves as the ultimate means of differentiation between a "good" idea and a "bad" one.

In an academic context (CS), this means that grants/papers/proposals often succeed more on the merits of the presenter (or writer) than the inherent value within an idea itself. After all, much of CS research is incremental improvements to existing work. Such papers may need a nice spin.

So perhaps undergrad CS majors (or at least, those who are grad school bound) should eschew higher level electives for a class in theatre or rhetoric...
Rough family, poverty. I grew up in council housing in West London, there was physical violence and there was crime everywhere around. I put myself on the streets to get myself away from the immediate physical danger and to prevent myself from continuing the vicious cycle of being nurtured in crime having that define my own life.

Whilst on the streets I hitch-hiked around, and as I did so I discovered that you slept during the day and kept your wits about you at night. It's too cold some nights to sleep out, so then you move. Or crawl into a building site where others wouldn't go and you'd be safe and mostly sheltered.

I eventually found that not being on the street at night was better than being on the street, since I was young I went to bars that had gigs. You could get in early before the gig started, so entrance was free. And then stay post-gig as a club would run until 3am at least. Some nights you'd meet students who would take an interest in the story and let you crash at theirs. Which is a free toast top-up and shower opportunity. I developed confidence from having to find these opportunities.

With the gigs settling in I would meet bands, and then they'd know me and give me free food from their riders. Eventually I knew a lot of the bands and I offered to run their T-Shirt stalls. This earned me money too.

Knowing the bands gave me exposure to them, so I wrote fanzines and sold those. You'd sell more fanzines if the band who were playing were on the cover... so I'd make only the insides, and produce covers according to who was playing.

Elastica took a shine to me so I followed them around, helped design their merchandise, run their paper mailing lists and sold T-Shirts. This led to the stock management thing, they purchased me an IBM computer which I put in the squat I then was living in. I built a program to manage their stock, then their mailing list, then tax reports of merchandise sold, etc.

Finally I ran into another band who I liked, and I offered all of the services I now knew how to do. The sales of merchandise, running of fan club, etc. They said yes, and I did that stuff and also acquired a modem (it was 1996 now). I taught myself HTML and PERL and made a website too.

Within 2 years I'd gone from the streets to employment in the music industry where programming was a core part of my job alongside selling merchandise. Later I worked directly for the label and by this time was off the streets properly with a flat-share with a girl I'd met in the music industry.

It makes a great tale, but not all of it was easy. Hunger was frequent, illness almost as frequent, cold nights scar your memory. I slept in some bad places at times, and other times managed to blag my way into some swanky places. It was ups and downs, but all of it was better than returning to the place where I had grown up. And the driving force in my life is to ensure that I never return to the place I came from, and to never go back to the streets. It's a hell of a motivator.
Though, not something I did directly.... Two teachers have named their children after me, is what I'm most proud of.
I'm unclear: are you looking for suggestions (a) after you have funding and can afford whatever is best for you, (b) before you have funding and are boot-strapping, or (c) during business planning so you can more accurately do financial projections and/or sound impressive to potential investors? The answers that I've seen seem to imply one or the other but I'm not quite sure your initial post told us this critical bit.
just to put in perspective for the non-metric aware in here:

human body temperature ~37C
water freezes at 0C and boils at 100C
MBTA sued for patent infringement over e-mail alerts on late trains, buses
GM Augmented Reality Windshield
Thanks. A few people have asked for a plugin so I will work on that for FF and chrome.

As for knowing how much time you've spent on a site, there is a stopclock mode, i.e. counting upwards from 0. Just http://howmany.minutes.at/yoursite
Keep Mozilla patent free. The HTML5 video jockeys want Flash dead more than they want the future of the internet to be open, they are being blinded by short term problems.

Support Mozilla for making the tough, but correct choice.
I think the idea that the article is “hating” or “blaming” Mozilla for anything is just a little bit overdoing it. To say the least. The article goes out of its way to empathise with and respect the Mozilla position.
Microsoft Mugged over VC-1 licensing terms (2007)
Tragedy of the Commons: a visualization
* two chicks at the same time
An old story but submitted for those who might be wondering why Microsoft isn't using their own codec for HTML5 video in IE9.
I grew up in a fishing village in the north of Scotland - when I was 19 one of my school friends insisted that I experience what it is like working on a trawler in the North Sea.

After a few days of sea sickness, hard work, lack of sleep, and fear I probably would have shot myself if someone had given me a loaded pistol.

Nothing I did since then (and I had summer jobs while I was a student doing things like weeding large fields of barley, digging ditches etc.) was anything like that.

So I learned to have a LOT of respect for people who don't have the chance to make lots of money sitting at a computer for most of the day.
If you're in the UK and were thinking of writing to your MP, use this form to do so:

http://www.38degrees.org.uk/page/speakout/extremeinternetl

You don't even need to be particularly detailed or articulate. I used to work for a political campaign and the mantra from our lobbyist was "Politicians do not read their mailbags. They weigh them."
* I lead the charge in 2008 to win the Best Act Ever award for Rick Astley at the MTV EMA's

* I was the youngest competitor at a car rally event here in Australia, competing against the likes of Sir Jack Brabham. (side note, we managed to get the porsche off the clock at nearly 300 km/hr)

* I designed a forced induction cooling system (originally for the same Porsche - the waste heat was then distributed to the fuel rail as a warmer), which then subsequently sold the idea to a racing team here in Australia. I'm pretty sure they shelved it.

* Some years ago, I accidentally set naughty bits on fire while trying to cook Ramen.
Jules is right; I wasn't talking about the Levine proof, but rather the 3 step proof the blog author mentions after that.

Step 2 is division by zero.
* I don't brag
Thanks for the comments everyone. I'll take them on board.
I dont think I can post my list of "achievements" now; not much could nail that as a personal achievement :) Kudos.

By the way; how did you manage to fix the brit? (if you dont mind me asking). That tickled me.
Multiple conversion goals for an A/B or multivariate test
Creating An NFS-Like Standalone Storage Server With GlusterFS On CentOS 5.4
And I thought developers don't brag...
An important addition to that is to repeatedly hit ctrl-r to cycle through the matching commands in the history.
It seems to me this is how capitalism works. Those that say a free market economy maximizes choice I think are out to lunch. If you want exactly the same thing that everyone else does, then yes there are tons of choices (e.g. 50 different types of toothpaste in the store), but if you want something that's even a little out of the mainstream, forget it. Try finding electronics at an electronics store, where by electronics I mean something that isn't a shrinkwrapped gadget, like a breadboard, for example.

Another personal story: I have fairly small feet, where by small I mean 39-40 in European size, which by no means is abnormally small. Finding shoes for me is a frustrating exercise because most stores don't carry sizes that small. And the thing is that every store stops at the same size, so if you don't find it in the first store it's highly unlikely that going to ten more stores will help.

It seems to me that what the article is describing is exactly what happens: everyone rushes to the largest market with the largest potential and, while in theory there should be someone establishing themselves in the smaller markets, when deciding whether they want to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond, they go with the latter.

It's like when you get to a fraction of the total market (defined in some way) and it's below 5% or something, it's not like only 5% of the actors in the market will offer something for you. Everyone makes the same decision so the selection quickly drops to zero.

Thing came out longer than I expected, sorry for rambling.
Ireland’s Epic Boom and Bust
Consistency would only matter if Mozilla offered a better alternative, that had the potential to become a popular lead standard. They don't, so the only way for them out of this in my humble and limited point of view is to join Netscape in oblivion.

Of course, since I'm so humble, you can ignore me.
I think you've got that exactly backwards. IronPython is much slower than CPython at exception handling and somewhat slower with strings, but very good at, e.g., simple arithmetic operations. (Presumably the JIT turns them into reasonably nice native code.) It's somewhat faster than CPython on PyStone and quite a lot slower on the Richards benchmark. It takes substantially longer to run the whole PyBench suite than CPython, but that's entirely accounted for by its rotten performance with exceptions.
Postcard From a Guangzhou Traffic Jam
Great Tutorial! An excellent way to get into Python Crypto Lib.
However, our lovely UK politicians have a history of counting all the many responses from a campaign as "one response" from a single organisation, then disregarding it as a minority view.

Lobbyists are so much easier to listen to than constituents. I'm wondering if there's merit in hiring some to represent the interests of the wider population? Perhaps we could call them MPs.
> "Xbox 360 Slim heading our way? Will it launch with Natal?"

And, more important, will news like these hurt sales of competing systems?
I didn't read the word "Examples:" for a second and thought those were all your accomplishments until I read [Insert Title]. Was about to just quit and go home lol.
The Moral Imperative of Investment Banking
Upvoted
Microsoft Hit With Another Multimillion Patent Loss in Texas
ok, I've got to give you that one.
So maybe something like boost?
I have no idea how to define it! I can give some examples of what it is and what it isn't, in my opinion. For example, anything that kind of shakes up my worldview of how something works is usually it. Gossip about which tech personality is an asshole SEO arbitrageur is usually not it.

I'm reminded of a story I read in one of Smullyan's books. A teacher is giving a mathematics lesson, and he gives the students a problem: "Prove that such-and-such is so-and-so. Any questions?" One of the students raises his hand. "Sir, what is a proof? How do we know whether a proof is any good or not?"

It turns out that although the idea of a proof is relatively easy to grok and to use, proving whether something is a proof or not is extraordinarily difficult. The story comes to mind for two reasons: First, because "intellectual curiosity" is like "proof," easy to grok but difficult to define precisely. And second, because now you've piqued my intellectual curiosity: Is it possible to write a program that does a good job of flagging off-topic stories?
Except to brag that you aren't bragging? Thanks chief
New York City Startups To Watch
That's right. Better to not write, not participate, not change anything. Nothing can be done, after all, so don't do anything.
That's awesome. Same age looking to do the same :) haven't yet :(
I'm not sure about that. But anyway your contacts will see your contacts's email.
Apple has had a history of thinking it invented something

The original claim was that they were "getting out of hand in assertions of ownership". An anecdote about something that is supposed to have happened privately 7 years ago (which doesn't even support your interpretation[1]) doesn't really answer to that. You'll note that Schwartz himself does not characterize Apple's recent actions as out of hand, but as an act of desperation.

I should have been clearer that I was asking specifically what was being referred to as "out of hand". Inter-CEO dickery seems like business as usual, and I don't think that's what the parent poster was referring to.

[1]: There is nothing in Schwartz' blog post to suggest that Steve Jobs thought anything in Keynote derived from Concurrence was his invention. In fact, for the anecdote to parse, you have to assume that Jobs found Schwartz' threat of using Concurrence IP against him to be credible. Unless you're privy to other information, I don't see where you get the idea that Apple asserted ownership over anything in Concurrence.
Americans are very narrow minded. They seem to fixate on the “winner”, and pile in to follow the market leader, ignoring the other successful, profitable businesses or platforms that have got quite so big yet.

Is this not true for the rest of the world? All industries are prone to fads. Just because the guys in the US - where, arguably, the action is - are caught up in this fad does not necessarily make them narrow minded. It makes no sense to extrapolate this to all Americans.

(Note: am neither American nor European.)
I have seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've see C-Beams glitter in the dark by the Tannhauser gate.
If companies didn't act in their own interests there wouldn't be competition!
Yup, recursion excites me. Viva la GEB :)
If you have never programmed before, I'd recommend you to start with html, then css, then javascript, then javascript on the server, then sql, then stop. Go back to the beginning and master every one of them.

Then in your spare time learn lisp.

The formers will give you money; the latter, enlightenment.
I find your story very inspiring. Thanks for sharing it.
Distributed Version Control is here to stay, baby
Oh no not that thread again!

I don't know if pg has exhibited, it would be interesting to know. Even more interesting would be to know if he still paints.
You forgot "I started Tarsnap."
The NYC Subway System
Interesting that IronPython is faster than CPython at processing exception handlers when no exception is thrown, but much slower at throwing.
Variants of CompareAndSwap
ok the "you people wouldn't believe" part soured me on this one. Loving all the other achievements though, find them inspiring (or that may just be my mid-life crisis kicking in)
This is just my personal opinion -- after TeX and real typesetting, typography on the web is so hideously ugly that when confronted with the prospect of a mostly-text website, a disheartened shrug and some basic HTML just to get the characters on a page is all that can be mustered.
Facebook Cofounder Chris Hughes' New Project: Jumo
Blogging is hard to give up, Joel?

Edit: Uh stop upvoting me please. That was a tongue-in-cheek comment and, as sant0sk1 pointed out below, also lazy on my part.
You can probably guess how with some background info:

It's 1998, this is the first Brit Award to allow internet voting. The voting is via a GET request, there is no cookie being set, no email address being collected... IP dupe checking is all they could be doing... but it's 1998 and every time you dial-up you get a new IP address.

We had a majordomo mailing list of 25,000 fans, and all of the other nominees had either no internet presence at that point or nothing more than a single page that they didn't even update with news about the award nomination.

Traditionally at that point the music industry used "phoners". Teams of paid people to phone up and rig an award. Pete Waterman had a good team, and it's a 2 week voting window. It took us a week to get rolling, but we did what you might expect with the info above and our mailing list.

At the end of week 1 someone leaked to Pete Waterman that they were out in the lead. He attempted to save the money and laid off his phoners, at that point our campaign just got underway, and with that mailing list being mostly passionate students we accelerated past what the phoners had achieved.

We only won by a small margin of a few thousand. But what mattered was the viral campaign and having Pete lay off the phoners. It was a bit of a scandal at the time, Pete was furious, but he just didn't really understand the internet and had been out-manoeuvred in a space he thought he knew intimately. We even made the front page of the Daily Record in Scotland :)
Playframework is just great..
SEO Articles & Past Newsletters by Beanstalk
cool story, bro.

^5
U.S. Obesity Trends (Maps/Infographics)
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It's stupid to have to wait >2 secs from pressing F5 to seeing the results of your code. Maybe not for a Java programmer, but if you're used to instant results from CPython it's annoying.
Okay, so stupid question time... but oh well.

Is there an easy way to download the corpus of comments?
It's a quote from Bladerunner.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tannhauser_Gate#Blade_Runner
I'm not sure how subtle it is to accuse a prominent government figure of being a war criminal but it's not just that one example, just the one that immediately sprang to mind. The book also covers the following topics in its SQL examples:

Excessive CEO compensation--and excessive, destructive layoffs

Union-busting activities

Positive role of unions in society

Police brutality

NATO bombing of civilian targets in Serbia

Managed Care

National Rifle Association and gun control

The prison industry

Slashing social programs to finance tax cuts
The open source washing machine project
How do you reverse the search? <S-C-R> didn't do it for me. Either way this could be a good substitute for what I do now, tediously grepping .zsh/bash_history...
Where did I say anything about not contributing to the bulging postbag?

It's not that I don't believe in expressing views to those who are supposed to represent me, it's just that I have very little faith that my view counts for anything.

When the system rejects rationality and evidence, and is perfectly happy to explicitly state that this is what they do (eg Prof David Nutt's experience), should I expect millions of voices to make a difference?

I am not apathetic or disengaged, I just suspect that I don't have enough money for my view to count for anything. I am depressed about continually getting HTTP 402 response codes from my MP.

Should I have a more positive outlook?
Whoa, respect to you Sir. It's funny how reading people's comments on HN makes me feel I "know" them. Your comments are usually excellent. But I would have never thought you were so good.

Ok, back to centering that bloody div.
So there isn't a large enough market in your area for a "real" electronics store - that means you are in the wrong place if you want to buy a breadboard in person, not that there is a problem with the free market.
I remember having a list of things I wanted to achieve when I was younger. Let's see:

- Win the nobel prize. (not yet)

- Write a book. (done)

- Travel the world (not totally done, but I live in South America now)

- Be Time magazine's man of the year (it's a bit of a cop-out, but done: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00....)

- Have my face on a stamp (not done, but that's easy these days)

Looking back, I was probably lacking ambition there, too focused on achievements that display what others think of me. Maybe I should make a new list.
Of course it assumes sudo's present.
Besides illustrating the Tragedy of the Commons, this is visual proof that, dare I say it, "the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence."
Ok, so...

Person A comes up with a term, let's call this term X.

Other people start mis-defining X as something else, let's call it Y.

Person B happened to talk about Y before person A talked about X.

Therefore, your argument goes, person A's definition of X is wrong?

Either I'm not following you, or your arguments are not following each other.

Eric Ries doesn't advise against getting big fast. He advises to get big as fast as possible, where "possible" is defined by the product-market fit that's been reached.
I think it's the last one. Tweeted 5 minutes ago by Joel (http://twitter.com/spolsky/status/10671213571):

"The last Joel on Software article[...]"
Not at all! Today is the ten-year anniversary of my first real post, so I've been planning to have my last real post on 3/18 for a long time.

Thanks for all your attention over the years. I'll still be around, just not doing these essays any more.
I used to shoot hoops with MJ
I thought the same thing, but to his credit:

"I announce my retirement from blogging effective March 18th"
Is google app engine SLA good enough for startups?
"If you are using Subversion, stop it. Just stop. Subversion = Leeches. Mercurial and Git = Antibiotics."

This is great. A few years ago, DVCS was weird and strange and SVN was the stuff. When people discover how awesome Git and Mercurial are, they stab SVN/CVS in the back.
I do forensic psychiatric risk assessments, and use the Hare Psychopathy Checklist regularly.

Neither sociopathy nor psychopathy is listed as a diagnosis in the DSM IV or IDC 10 (the current canonical lists of diagnoses for mental health). Both are listed as descriptors to "Dissocial Personality Disorder" in the ICD 10.
When I was thirteen or so, I got a job offer for independently inventing AJAX. Everywhere I looked at the time said you couldn't read data from the server using Javascript, but I realised that if you opened a new window to a separate page it could be done.

I didn't take it anywhere, and later (after people discovered xmlhttprequest) I learned that even at the time I could have used an iframe, which would have been nicer. I assume people were doing that before I made my discovery, but I don't know for sure.
Using a CRC to authenticate a message is why we have an SSHv2; SSH made a similar mistake.
On the contrary, if you stop and think about it, my comment is constructive; especially if you care about brand management. The simple fact is, Kayne's brand is tainted by his actions and diatribe. As a start-up, I would not want to engage my brand in the kind of controversies he stirs up (unless I was targeting only his fans as my demographic).
"Accidental". Heh.