skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I should just shrug it off and say "haha, you got us, we're certainly stuffy", look at the things we often are trying to discuss in Literature.

Now, it's one thing to question the artistic merits of literature studied in academia, such as the almost impenetrable "Finnegan's Wake". It's not all because of its vernacular (I can't really read too much of it at a time because it blurs into almost gibberish after awhile and I lose track of stuff I'd just read a line prior), but because it seriously doesn't make any damned sense sometimes, which is common when alot of it is written stream of conscious.

But, I get the argument: literary criticism is self-perpetuating, self-congratulatory stuff in many cases. But, just as for every solid software developer who understands the art and science of software construction in the tradition of Fred Brooks or Steven McConnell, there is the spaghetti coder with terrible habits (pushing broken code to the repo, no code commenting, etc.). The same laziness and idiosyncratic behavior is rife in litcrit as well. For every Harold Bloom and James Wood, there's alot of hacks that toss off their "deconstructions" rife with tautologies and dense nonsense. It's part of any discipline to separate the good from the bad; the humanities is no different.
That doesn't make sense. You can't estimate risk by looking only at the number of survivors.
There Are No Pictures of iPhone 4 on Google Image Search
Not really - credit card rewards/miles offer a real reward for doing something, achievements in the way Xbox does it (and everyone copies thoughtlessly) does not. I can exchange my points for something of tangible value to me - I doubt people would care about credit card points if they were purely for shits and giggles.

Achievements are fascinating, and MS certainly has pulled it off admirably. But whenever I hear of a web startup doing achievements and other game mechanics, I can't help but feel that it often is simply trying to mask the fact that their service offers insufficient value to their user, and they have to inject "socialness" to make it more attractive.
That is one upside. Another is that the times table is much simpler to memorize. Another is that when storing round numbers of things, it is more likely that we'll have convenient packings. Another is that a dozenal based measurement system is convenient enough in enough places to justify using dozenal based time and angle measurements, making for easier conversions. (For instance in the metric system it is sometimes convenient to think in terms of km/hour and other times m/s. Converting between the two is a PITA. Using dozenal everywhere would make that conversion entirely unnecessary.)

There are many small details, but every one you compare finds conveniences for the dozenal system that aren't there for the decimal one.

However it is clear that the wins aren't nearly enough to justify the transition in any reasonable time frame. Which is why the dozenal movement is bound to remain an amusing curiousity.
Do a quick logo yourself. You can use Inkscape or GIMP.
Count on the knuckles of the fingers of one hand. (Fingers, not counting the thumb.)

Using both hands and positional notation you can easily count to a gross.
>- It would be great if this were true (Yay afterlife/alternate worlds!)

Why can't you do enough in one life? Craving for an afterlife is the pastime of procrastinators.
I'm very curious to know the experience of business owners who've used Groupon - I've just made a post questioning its value at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1490096. I'd love to get HN's feedback on whether or not we should use the service.
Apps are simply more valuable than logos, period.

It isn't too hard to make an app generator that pumps up generic apps in a similar way that icons can be made by slightly tweaking another preexisting icon.

The value with apps is much the same as it is with icons (or design, in general); in how unique and well thought out it is, how well it applies to what you need it for.
I agree with your first point in as much as people are free to work or not work as they please. That said, here's some perspective from the design side which may help you understand how designers may think about these kinds of things, even if you disagree or find it a touch extreme: http://www.no-spec.com/faq/

As for your second point, how much would you say the brand equity of Apple, Coca-Cola, or Nike is worth? They would simply be selling electronics, sugary water, and shoes if they didn't have design and marketing experts building and executing their brand (experts who I'm sure have been compensated quite handsomely). While I'll agree that it's easier to "throw together" a logo than a web app, good design does require reasonable skill, training, and experience.

ADDED: I guess I should be clear that I'm rebutting the assertion that design is necessarily less valuable than software development, not that startups require Fortune 500 branding.
There's always been progress! It's true that one person can do a lot with all those new tools, but two people can do more.
William Dalrymple on the historical background of the war in Afghanistan
I think AirBnB et al need to make it clear that they are attempting to BE the regulatory system. The major argument behind bills like this is that regulation is a nightmare, and it's not an unreasonable one. Unless of course you understand how AirBnB works, and the kind of regulation it provides.
Thank you. It's refreshing to finally see some feedback on them.

Are there any "cons" of working there? What made you move on?
I love this story. I remember reading a very abridged version of it in one of my Super Fact Books when I was 8 or 9 (it omitted the fact that he murdered dozens of people, for instance). Still, he's an amazing (if very, very dumb) character.
Winners never quit and quitters never win but if you never win and never quit...
This seems very strange to me. There are no Apple PR pictures or pictures taken by normal folks. On the second page of results there's a picture of a picture of the phone (at the keynote), but it's not until page six that there's actually a picture of the thing. And it's the stolen Gizmodo one at that.

Am I the only one that finds this really weird?

(Here's a screenshot, as I imagine this will change at some point: http://cloudwalking.posterous.com/where-are-all-the-iphone-4...)
Good list.

I would include some more pragmatic algorithms, such as Frank Liang's hyphenation algorithm (PhD thesis at Stanford in 1983) http://www.tug.org/docs/liang/

Also De Casteljau's algorithm for Bezier curves from 1959 and deBoor's algorithm for B-splines.

The above are the ones that I have had to implement in the past as part of my work. There is a whole bunch of other algorithms in computer graphics that are equally (or more) important, which many of us rely on but fortunately don't have to implement.

Oh, another classic, pragmatic algorithm is John Carmack's implementation of BSP-based pseudo-3D rendering for the Doom game engine in 1993. See http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom_rendering_engine
Never used Groupon, but you might want to try emailing/calling some of the Retailers that have used Groupon in the smaller cities and see firsthand how effective it is.

Might be hard to find a "Retail Owner" here on HN.
Humanity is finite.

And we'll end far, far before the heat death of the universe.
Learn a little bit about typography and then peruse fontsquirrel.com, pick an interesting font and let it do the work for you. Most enduring logos are not graphically complex.

Simple Logos: Bayer, 3M, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo etc

I also second the recommendation to make friends with inkscape and gimp
The power of indoctrination is strong.
Oh, yeah, I should have mentioned that if you come up with a few domains you really like that are taken, you might as well contact the owner and see what happens. But if they want thousands of dollars that you aren't willing to part with just for a domain, looking for obscure ones is probably the way to go.

Also, while it is true that domains are an investment, I'd keep in mind that they're pretty risky and illiquid investments. Unless you negotiate well or get someone who doesn't know the market value of the domain, you're probably going to pay approximately what you'll get for it if someone actually comes around wanting the domain. But that might not happen or might not happen for years. I guess there are probably domain squatting sites that would buy the domain from you, but probably for much less than what you paid, especially since you're approaching them, so they know you want to get rid of it and would probably do it for much less than what it's potentially worth.
Hypothesis: the typo "sl" is only common among left-handers.

I shall have to add my vioce to the small left-handed chorus here and say that I too have never had an issue with the "sl" typo. In fact I cannot remember a single occasion where I have made this mistake.

I've intentionally left a typo that I did just make in the above paragraph to illustrate my own tangentially related observation: The typos that tend to occur within my own typing often seem to be the kind produced by one hand not two. By which I mean the typo "vioce" rather than "voice" happened because the fingers of my right hand hit the keyboard in the wrong sequence. Where as typos involving a finger from one hand then a finger from the other (as would need to be the case with "sl" rather than "ls") tend to be less common... for me anyway.
Many of the issues no-spec brings up (ie: mostly misleading the designer about potential reward) are not present on 99Designs and contest sites, as people knowingly compete in contests for exact terms up front, not for potential jobs.

The brands you mention are priceless, but the logo is not. Nike's logo was cheap as hell, for instance.

99Designs serves a completely different market, and I think the "How much is a F500 Company's brand worth?" argument HEAVILY confuses marketing, design, branding and advertising.
It doesn't quite do that yet. Given a section of known plaintext of about 50 characters it can find the original key used (or at least enough of the key to then turn the problem into a mono-alphabetic cipher).
In the early stages of a company, the logo contributes very little to the company's success. All it does is signal that the company is somewhat professional. It requires little uncommon expertise to achieve this goal.

The comparison to Apple, Coke and Nike isn't applicable. You're describing a different product than most startups are looking for.

Exhibit A: http://techcrunch.com/2006/07/15/is-twttr-interesting/

Exhibit B: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_logo
Our First Sponsored Sprint - Montréal-Python Packaging
How to Make a Harmless
Can your computer be like your priest?
"In my case, my wife helps me get through. In many ways, although she is not technically a co-founder, she helps with a ton of admin work and, more importantly, has helped me stay positive. She has been as much a part of this startup as I have, and has suffered through the same things."

I'm curious about the line between co-founder on paper and the role a spouse or significant other plays? A spouse in this position is clearly contributing to the success and viability of the "single-founder" venture. If the spouse is not there to help this would increase the workload and the founder would have to seek out someone else for emotional support. The shared risk is there as well as the shared hardship. If the founder can say that their spouse has been as much a part of the start-up as they have, then how they not a co-founder?

They may not be a founder on paper, but especially in light of how assets are split during a divorce it seems the reality shows that they do have a stake in the business's earnings.
CLR is an extremely well written algorithms textbook, but I use it more as a reference than for self-study. My first algorithms book was Sedgewick's Algorithms (where all algorithms were presented in Pascal), which is a very good algorithms text that is much lighter on several aspects.

Recently, however, I came across the following gem: Algorihtms + Data Structures = Programs, by Niklaus Wirth. (an Oberon version of 1994 is available for free: http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/WirthPubl/AD.pdf). I think this is hands down one of the best algorithm books. It amazes me how much content Niklaus Wirth is able to present in concise, yet crystal clear writing. Besides the usual algorithms, he includes very interesting applications that probably no other book does: using the partitioning of QuickSort to find the median (pg. 56 in above PDF, Section 2.3.4), based on algorithm by C.A.R. Hoare, and an in-depth discussion of polyphase sort (pg. 70, Section 2.4.4), which might be interesting for heavily distributed sorting (that at least what I imagined as a possible application when I recently re-read parts of it).
Every UTF-8 character, as it would appear in a valid OAuth request
"Handicapping the Players" http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/04/handicapping-internet-platf...
There are tons of designers who will do logo artwork for $150-200. I would suggest doing the typography yourself in Inkscape or Illustrator if you can, and then if you feel the need for a nice vector drawing to add to the text, pay someone later.
ii.) I'd noticed a while ago that all graph traversal algorithms follow the same pattern. There is a white set of undiscovered nodes, a grey set of discovered-but-unvisited nodes, and a black set of visited nodes. To execute the graph traversal, you push a start node into the grey set, and then recursively pop a node off the grey set, add any children of it that are currently in the white set to the grey set, and repeat until everything is in the black set. The structure of the grey set determines the particular traversal algorithm:

1. If it is a stack, then you have a depth-first search, which visits all children first and then moves on to siblings.

2. If it is a queue, then you have a breadth-first search, which visits all siblings first and then starts recursing into children.

3. If it is a priority queue keyed by edge weights, then you have Dijkstra's algorithm, which will find the shortest path to any node in the graph.

4. If it is a priority queue keyed by in-degree of nodes, then you have a topological sort.

5. If it is a priority queue keyed by the lowest edge weight such that the endpoint of the edge is in the black set, then you have Prim's algorithm for minimum spanning trees.

You can have more exotic data structures too, eg.:

6. If it is a linked-list encoding of a stack done through pointer reversal, you have a mark & sweep garbage collector.

7. If it is a test on whether the pointer points to from-space or to-space, you have a Cheney-style breadth-first copying garbage collector.

I'd never seen a formalism that described this - it was just something I figured out when I was implementing my 3rd or so topological sort. I assumed that something like that must exist though - the notion of white/grey/black sets for graph traversal is well established in at least the garbage collection literature, and from there it's a short leap to figure out what structure of the grey set corresponds to which graph algorithm.

I just took a quick look at the A* entry in Wikipedia - I've heard of it but never had a reason to implement it myself - but it seems like it's a generalization of Dijkstra's algorithm where edge weights can be arbitrary functions. In this case, it's the same as case #3, but the keys to the priority queue are a function of the node instead of a straight list of edge weights.
My point was not to try to refute his arguments. He has good reasons and tons of experience.

That said, there are still people who are going to do startups on their own anyway and some will be successful. I wanted to share what's worked for me so far.
Now there was a man who needed to learn how to lose.
I can't imagine the review-bombing on Amazon helps sales.
Startup digest is smart because it just sends out lists of events. While it does take some effort to do the research to find these events, it seems like it would be easier to put together than a full fledged magazine like most of these newsletters are ( thrillist, dailycandy, etc ).

It could be expanded to other niches: wine festivals in your city, folk concerts in your city, etc

Ive been trying to brainstorm other newsletter ideas that could be built without a huge time investment every day to produce the newsletter.

Some I've thought of:
- 'Techmeme' newsletter. Build a 'techmeme' for beekeepers or some other niche and send out the links to the best stories & blog posts on beekeeping in a weekly digest post.

- some deal newsletters could also be mostly automated with scraping
Ask HN: How will it impact my webapp if it is written in Python instead of PHP.
Folks, I have seen too many HN posts on the fact that PHP is not a good language to develop a robust web application, despite of the fact few of the biggest web sites are running on PHP. We(my team and me) started debating on the issue of choice of the technology for the next project. I am still in some ways not convinced that python may be a better approach.

PHP and Python

* Both have good framework web.py | codeigniter

* Both have good helpful community and support

* Both large set of plugins

How will it impact my webapp if it is written in Python and not PHP
My pet hate is :Wq, if that isn't a valid command anyway, would there be any harm in simply making it :wq quietly? Damn pedants.
Thanks - that's a great idea. I actually am friends with the operator of one of these clones and she herself has expressed that it might hold dubious value for most business owners. I will try to hunt down some retailers offline who've actually worked with them.
The Lies of the Creative Class
Something interesting about Steam - it is a business model that creates a software distribution business without leveraging copyright. The guys at Valve have taken responsibility for their business model, rather than insisting that the government do it. Positive.
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As a user I don't have any strong preference either way but the presence of a shiny icon on my home screen prompts me to visit a site more often than a bookmark that is several taps away. Adding bookmarks to the home screen on the iPhone is more realistic with folders to organize them in but it's still a multi-step process to put it there in the first place. It's unfortunate tapping a piece of glass more than once is a barrier but it just seems to work out that way these days for me.
Huh.

I'd always imagined more circumscribed pentagrams were involved. And some chanting. And a cubicle.

<Blink> on, Lynx lovers. It does make sense in that context, especially after my recent 4-month battle with Ncurses.

edit: wow, this guy is influential. And no wonder he was considering Lynx in this: http://www.montulli.org/lou
In my experience (as an iOS app developer) people overestimate the returns they'll get from being listed in the app store. It might make sense for big brands because people might search for them, but smaller brands will not be more visible than when having a mobile site. In fact, when it is necessary to search, getting an app from the store and then using it takes a lot more steps then searching in the browser and going to the website.

My standard response when people ask me about building an app is if they've considered creating a mobile site. Unless they have something platform/device specific in mind, like in app purchases, push notifications, using the camera or compass or if the UI is important, it often does not make sense to create an app.

Most important, however, is the user (surprise, surprise). What is the task the user will perform at your site/with your app? If it's something they'll only do a couple of times (or even once) it's not worth an app (unless, maybe, you want them to pay for it). Installing an app is a much bigger upfront commitment (even if it's free) than visiting a website.
That's correct, except for performance tweaks like transients

http://technomancy.us/132

http://fupeg.blogspot.com/2009/11/persistent-data-structures...

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/msg/99d1cfcc3a9b520b
> Apple doesn't advertise the fact that they do keep a list of your purchases. If you call them you should be able to get them to let you re-download all the content you have bought through ITMS.

yeah but sadly:

1. the list of stuff bought is pretty well hidden, and it's a pain to get back to the media from there. Steam gives you your library front and center, and from there it's a right and a left click to reinstall

2. for everything other than apps, you can't just re-download the stuff you lost. You have to re-buy it. That sucks. A lot. Here's hoping that improves with a hypothetical iTunes 10 / iTunes Cloud.
"brand equity of Apple, Coca-Cola, or Nike"

The last time I checked, Fortune 500 companies weren't shopping for logos on 99designs.

"They would simply be selling electronics, sugary water, and shoes if they didn't have design and marketing experts building and executing their brand"

We're talking about logo design for startups, not marketing strategy for large retail corporations. Apples and oranges.

"good design does require reasonable skill, training, and experience."

I absolutely agree. It takes a lot of skill to be a good designer.
I'm an aspiring Designer/Developer. I've had some experience with logo design, and I'm always looking to expand my portfolio. You can check out some of my work at http://donaldlivingston.com/portfolio
Feel free to contact me via http://www.donaldlivingston.com/contact/
Midnight Commander 4.7.3
Offline mode works if you want to go faster and/or need it though. Didn't work a few years ago, but works like a charm nowadays, it's a pleasure.
Not trying to be rude, but it seems like the piece does devote more space to defending single founder startups than offering advice. I think that's why I'm not alone in responding to it on that level.
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> For publishers to understand why restricting rights of their customers is bad for them, they need to understand this. Steam, and other systems like it are the future.

Steam does restrict customer rights (can't resell games for instance). The truly important thing is that the rights your DRM scheme restricts should not be rights the user cares for or wants to use.

At the end of the day, experience is king, and Steam's great because the experience is better than piracy's.
I guess it depends how you measure good software. Wordpress works. Really well.
Here's another example: the GoDaddy logo.

http://www.dotweekly.com/the-story-behind-the-godaddy-name-a...
Cappuccino vs jQuery
It does sound like a hardware problem. It could, however, also be the game, which is corrupt.

Fret not, there's an app^H^H^H solution for that:

- Right click the game in your games list
- Select properties
- Select "local files" tab
- Click "Check integrity of game cache" (or so)

This can take some time, but will re-download corrupted game components. I ususally have to do this with Dirt, when it dies ungracefully on me.