skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
- Go with your gut reaction - that's all you have right now, until you build up experience. But listen to that small voice that says 'hey, this isn't right' and don't let people talk you out of it, even when you don't have a logical argument to pose to them.

- Be the person who helps old people, who holds the door for everyone, who goes out of your way to help people. There is nothing sweeter than improving the quality of someone's life.

- Money means nothing. Don't loan money to people - just give it to them if they need it more than you.

- Be very very careful about the implications of raising money for a startup. Taking investment means you are beholden to your investors to create a return. So if the company you are starting is your dream, your life, your everything be so aware that you are indeed selling this dream and you are no longer the master of it.

- Always be the better person. Time and time again people will crap upon you, and how you react is truly a measure of what kind of person you are, and how people will judge you. Don't complain, don't whine. Forgive and forget. Surprise people with your compassion and always help your 'enemies' be better people, even if they are making your life miserable.

- killer meal to cook for that special someone (if your not an amazing cook): get a couple fillet's of white fish + put a ton of lemon pepper on them + throw them in the oven until they break up easily. Steam broccoli or asparagus.

- Floss daily.

- Look around and choose which friends you will have in 10 years. Those are the relationships to foster. A good friend means you can go years without talking, then pick up right where you left off.

- Be comfortable being alone. Love being alone. If you truly believe you are amazing, other people will too. Charm will get you further than you can imagine.

- Always tip well.
A floor rep at IKEA shared with me their method for putting desks together when the components don't actually screw together. For example, with a top placed on trestles; the trestle top has holes that align with a pin screwed into the underside of the top, but it's not very secure.

Industrial strength Velcro. It holds the top in place quite well, yet makes it very easy and quick to tear the desk down. With self adhesive backing, you place a strip of the "nap" on one piece and a strip of the "hooks" on the other piece, and Bob's your uncle.
Have you used the iPhone 4? You definitely feel the extra weight, but not because it's heavier but because it's more dense. It's quite a bit thinner yet slightly heavier which gives the impression of it being noticeably heavier.
Since the difficulty of hiring such programmers is a common theme here the last couple days, how have you gone about finding these guys?
I only beseech your wisdom about what mistakes/naivetes
I'll incur in my twenties

Strangely enough, a lot of the things you look back on as being "silly" from high-school, really aren't. From a certain point of view. You can only truly live in "the now" and what seems important right now, really is what's important right now. Not to sound fatalistic, but we're not guaranteed anything, not even to wake up tomorrow.

That said, probably the biggest thing I look back on my twenties and think "I was wrong about this" about is this: When I was in my twenties, I had no conception of just how short life is, and how quickly some opportunities can vanish. So I was too patient. I believed "patience is a virtue" (and in some ways it is) but I was probably too patient, too willing to take my time and "wait for things to develop." In retrospect, there are times when being more aggressive and forcing the issue is called for.

Like Bon Jovi sang:

Luck, it ain't enough, you gotta make your own breaks.
It's my life. It's now or never. I ain't going to live
forever. I just want to live while I'm alive ...

Sometimes you really have to say "fuck it, I'm making this shit happen and I ain't waiting."

The kicker is, there are still times when patience IS a virtue. The tough part is telling the difference. So if I had any advice for 20-something, it would be to think long and hard about situations and opportunities, do some "scenario analysis" and really consider when it's necessary to go balls out and go for broke and be aggressive.

I wish I could say there's an easy way to tell the difference, but even now at 37, I still don't know for sure. But at least be aware... You can't always just wait, wait, wait.
It's really hard, especially during the first couple years, but my only perspective is as a bootstrapper, I think funded people maybe have more flexibility (or maybe not? I dunno).

My experience is that you just have to force yourself to stop working. It's terribly easy to let your business tak over your life. Me, I just force myself to forget about everything but the bat-phone on Sundays.
April 2008
I kind of feel bad for Brightkite, getting left out of all this location based social networking talk, these days.
It's a shame that most of my Comp Sci peers don't seem to take much pride in actually building readable code. Building something that works is important, of course, but so is how it looks on the inside. Kind of analogous to building a house: sure, you can build something that keeps the rain off and the sun out in a relatively short time, but building it to stand the test of time is at least as important as keeping out the elements, if not more so.
But things you learn also fade, unless you use them.
It's usually just acquaintances from work or an organization.
First of all, don't get locked into Photoshop tutorial mode.
Tutorials can be helpful, but unless you understand the reasoning behind what you're trying to achieve, you're only going to be learning how to do that one thing.

For a broader perspective that will serve you well, I recommmend:

1. Take an art history course - Or watch a video survey of the subject

2. Learn to draw - Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is a good introduction

3. Learn the basics of typography - Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style is a classic

4. Visit museums of art and design

Since you're talking about web design in particular, I'd recommend reading Jakob Nielsen, as well as Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think to make sure your design ideas don't clash with usability.
It is more readable. But I wanted to stick close to the general formula [1], so that you see what's going on. It would probably have been better to write it as:

y = 2
average x1 x2 = (x1 + x2) / 2
next x = average (y/x + x)

It's just a co-incidence that I chose y as 2.

[1] Heron's Method (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herons_method#Babylonian_method)
Yep, but I believe you have to handle persisting to disk yourself (there might be a Redis-like solution to this that I'm not aware of, though).
Currently, to make the writing interesting, I take short children stories and print it out on cursive font (dotted) and make him write over it and read it later, this is done as an time bound activity. I need to wait few more weeks to see the results of this exercise.
Idea: Find out what happens to news stories a year later
I was reading an old newspaper and remembered: Hey, Russian sent troops into Georgia! What ever happened to that? I went online to look it up and had a thought:

It'd be awesome if there was a time capsule I could stick news stories in, so I could see where they went a year later. Exists? Thoughts?
If you're making your own (or purchasing, for that matter), having or being able to make a front edge that is slightly rounded makes a big difference. Depending on your posture and ergonomic use of the desk, a sharp, right angle front edge can be annoying. It doesn't have to be much; an 1/8 inch or 3 mm quarter round makes a big difference.

As for adjustable height in a (partially) self-built desk, I've used these IKEA trestles:

VIKA ARTUR

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00144763

I was fortunate to get some off-white ones, that apparently didn't sell too well but look great in my place, for some ridiculously low sale price. Normal price seems a bit high for a "budget desk".

P.S. IKEA U.S., your now-even-heavier Flash site blows (chunks) this morning.
I second that. One of the drawback of writing slow, is that children often miss what's written on the board and unfortunately at times, teachers forget this.
Cloudkick: Closing in on Google Closure
It would be a huge improvement to the accessibility and semantics if the p tags were changed to label tags with for attributes.
I think this works if you're a one man shop...once you hire employees, though, things change. A lot. You have to keep your business running because your devs have trusted you with their family's financial well-being; you have a responsibility to keep the business healthy.
There's really two ways to look at this:

* Eliminating non-essential expenses. i.e. Stuff you want, but not need.
* Minimizing your foundation costs. Shelter, utilities (internet, phone, electricity, etc), transportation, medicine, food.

Eliminating the first is easy and can be done without sacrifice -- you don't need them. The second can be considerably harder as there's always a floor.

However I will say this, from experience. I've found many people to look very strangely at the first item. I'm not a minimalist, but I really don't own a lot of stuff. The general reaction I've gotten with dates has been initially positive (because the space itself, and what is there, is beautiful) but grew increasingly negative as a result of consumer culture. I've only found two gals who "got it".
> At what point did I 'protect' capitalism?

You didn't make a sign or wave a $ symbol flag. When you say you "haven't heard a better argument", I read "won't hear a better argument". Perhaps you don't mean it that way, in which case, apologies first.

Perhaps your studies and intellectual investment would be of less worth if someone were to dare point out any alternative possibilities.

When there is talk about a resource-based economy or singularity government, would-be opposers jump in quickly to shoot an idea down rather than see value.

> The problem is that I don't think you've actually studied capitalism as a moral/economic philosophy (but I could be wrong) so saying "we need to find something more mature and stable" doesn't really have any significance.

You are right. I have not studied Capitalism or any other type of economic framework. But would it matter? If you've committed to the idea of our "finest form" of economy, than like any religious person, your opinions are hopeless to evolve.

We see millions suffer across the world as our "best" economical structure fuels its fire on the backs of the uncountable. If everyone were to embrace Capitalism as most modern nations have, Capitalism would have no "grease bin", so to speak.

I am sure the people of developing countries share a different opinion than you. Are they wrong?
I am in my twenties. That being said, I would answer your question in book form -- that is, books that changed the way I do things and view the world and that I wish I'd read when I was younger:

1. <em>Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience</em> by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

2. <em>The Guide to Getting It On</em> by Paul Johannides [sp?]

3. <em>The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature</em> by Geoffrey Miller

4. <em>Hackers & Painters</em> by Paul Graham

5. <em>Man's Search for Meaning</em> by Viktor Frankl

6. <em>Stumbling on Happiness</em> by Daniel Gilbert

7. <em>The Time Paradox</em> by Philip Zimbardo.

That last one is particularly important: it points out that, once you've reached a comfortable but, for a highly educated person, relatively low level of income (around ~$40K for an individual), additional income increases do not matter for very for overall happiness.

What does? Friends, family, your sex life, meaningful work.

What doesn't help for happiness? TV. See the journal article "Does watching TV make us happy?" by Bruno S. Frey, Christine Benesch, and Alois Stutzer for more on the answer: "no."
Disclaimer: I worked at Joost.

To be fair, I think there were some mistakes in technology, but I agree 100% that your main point about content acquisition was the real nail in the coffin.

But using P2P, RDF, Proprietary Server Side Javascript, technology offices in 5 or 6 countries; These are all things that certainly didn't help.

Building on P2P part was built around the premiss that bandwidth would stay expensive, but it didn't. But at the same time, when Joost started, every premium content owner out there wanted realish DRM, so you still would of had a thick client. Later we actually switched to Flash and HTTPS, because bandwidth was cheap, and content owners stopped carrying nearly as much, but the problem of content acquisition still meant we had zero unique content.
Where is FUD in my comment? Or am I wrong thinking that MySQL has more and different scenarios production install than PG?
MySQL is also used on very large scale every day, so?
Compiling Structural Types on the JVM
For startups, a categorization by stage of company would be usefull.
impetus
It might be clearer to have it fade to "disabled", but not entirely disappeared on Done, at least until the list is re-loaded.
Websites get hacked on Wednesdays
Stop Repeating Yourself. Deduping WAN-Opt Style
Learning methodologies change very slowly. You will notice we still learn via institutions which is something like an 500 year old concept.

It's not about techies not contributing, it's about the pace of the industry you are in. Learning which is vocational in nature is the market you seek.
Why relive, when you can 'live' new experiences?
The spherical goods market is a $83.2b annual spent by consumers alone. If they can get just 1% of that...
- Stick to a daily exercise routine at all costs

Yes, absolutely this. I can't reiterate that strongly enough. Do NOT make the mistake of letting your fitness go by the wayside. The older you get the harder it is to maintain (or increase) your fitness level... and if you spend a decade sitting on your bum eating chips and getting fat, it's a royal pain to get back into shape. Don't ask me how I know this. :-)
A minor clarification: there was nothing stupid, per se, about selling pet related products online. It was their execution that was horribly flawed. Others have executed on the "sell pet stuff online" idea and succeed to one degree or another.
CoffeeScript!

It's got all the power of JavaScript (which, in addition to its monopoly on browser scripting, is now a respectable server-side language thanks to Node.js et al.), it's very new (first source push was in December), and the syntax is just beautiful—even nicer than Python's, in my opinion. I've been totally thrilled since I've started playing with it, and I'm using it for some serious browser-based projects.
The main reason I'm completely happy with my iPhone, even with all its closed-ness, is because for me, it's just a phone. All I want out of my device is basic phone functionalities, a simple camera, access to the Internet, and the ability to play some games.

Until there are several features I truly feel like I'm missing out on because I'm stuck in Closed iPhone Land, or until there's a distinctly better device out there, I'm going to stick with it.
Angel Investing By The Numbers
And what is execution but a series of related, more specific ideas? (plus capital)
Time and practice are the best teachers. If you can tell what (you think) looks good, then you have already solved half of your problem. Spend a few hours tweaking and improving on a design until you are able to come up with a design that you like. Look for inspiration on movies, photographs, nature or other websites.

I remember spending a couple of days on my old website design. I listened a lot to soma.fm and I noticed that the music kept me focused on the design I was working on. I remember dreaming about what I am going to tweak/change the next time I opened Photoshop.

Also, learning to imagine and think ahead on "how to do this and that in HTML/CSS" will save you a lot of time and effort.
If you go back far enough, you won't find anyone who thought the way we do about race, so the label you're putting on Gandhi here is an anachronism and the moralism implicit in it is glib.

A more interesting place to look for Gandhi's shadow side is in the dynamics of his family, particularly his oldest son (IIRC) who lived out all the things his father hated; he became an alcoholic and, worse, a salesman.
Practice. Try copying designs you like...add your own spin;
Get proficient with design tools (Adobe suite or equivalent).

I also personally use lynda.com - they have great tutorials for all the adobe programs - also some good general videos about color theory and design principles.

I also liked this PDF by Massimo Vignelli:
http://www.vignelli.com/canon.pdf
Yes, I pretty much did not read past the <p>Name:</p> point.
It looks nice, but I agree with wbond. Not only should the p tags be labels, but the divs could be fieldsets to make it more semantic.
sorry, I shouldn't have taken the default on that. I noticed the same problem.
Jinx: a novel Linux deterministic multiprocessing debugger
Signs the Economy is Worse Than Ever in Your Lifetime
Shouldn't you be enjoying the summer in Sweden, then, and taking vacation in the winter?
Ignore the name - this is a clearly-written introduction to stream processing algorithms.
If you have a design school nearby take some continuing ed. classes.
I think that the consensus seems to be: 'Web video requires Flash' has to die.

Of course, it needs to be alive in order to its death being a necessity.

I don't know any single opinion stating that HTML5 is ready.
Jeff Dean (for those wondering): http://research.google.com/people/jeff/index.html
Companies like FourSquare remind me of pop songs.

They're catchy, it's hard to describe exactly what makes them work, and if you're lucky, you'll write one your entire life.

What I don't get is why a "hit song" can be considered an entire company. Why is FourSquare trying to raise millions of dollars of investment money? Why not try and come up with another 7 or 8 products?

I mean seriously, what are they looking to become, the next Google? Do they have some sort of BadgeRank algorithm? The next Facebook? Are you going to be able to buy location based ads so you can direct people to your FanBadge pages so you can find out how many people like your Badges?

To me it seems like if investors, instead of investing in a gaming company, invested in just ONE game.

"Here you go, here's $20million, kid. Make sure that Warcraft keeps being the best game. Just keep adding to it, and adding to it, and adding to it, forever."

I'm hoping that FourSquare see themselves as a publisher of fun, little things, and try to develop new, even more fun, little things, and not become a big bloated "what the hell has this thing become" product.
Making major decisions for "service, the user base, the team, and the shareholders (pretty much in that order)" doesn't strike me as particularly wise.

In my experience, user loyalty is worth very little. If it suits them, users will happily go and use a competing service that copies everything you do. Caring about the users is noble but a bit misguided since the users don't care about you in the slightest. Of course, people often say "we're doing this for the users!" whether that is the primary motivation or not.

I can see not feeling ready to sell out so soon, though. Foursquare has all sorts of potential and they're well situated to go in a number of directions. For instance, the local review (yelp) direction is natural, and look at the massive valuation Google et. al have considered for Yelp.
When my friend from college visited me (it's been many years since college, and now we both have jobs), I couldn't understand why I just couldn't hang out like before. I mean, sure, I could spend a couple of days and show my friend around the city, but I realized that for some reason, I had moved on. I kept thinking that I had become a snobbish, snooty SOB. I now know that I've just changed - I have a different circle of friends (for better or worse) and I can no longer go back to who I was in college. And I think it's OK (and in many ways, good).
http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/17/2010/06/smart...

I would think that 90 million triangles/sec (3x that of iPhone 4) would be enough to do fast, 3d games.
VIM to write mails in Thunderbird
Some people keep "job postings" up that never close because they are just collecting resumes rather than filling an open position. See justin.tv for instance. I guess that sort of ties into your #3.
My first reaction was to think of the addictive tendencies. That we've replace the nicotine fix with the erstwhile email, now more generalized information fix.

It will make you better. (Like nicotine helped one calm down and concentrate.)

Further irony, if years hence we do define a cancer risk from this latest "fix".
thats a good writeup. I wonder if there's anything UL for components.
> You definitely feel the extra weight

This the same sloppy language I was poking fun of in the original article. I highly doubt that you can detect a ~2% difference in weight of 0.1oz. If the wording were "it's only 0.1oz heavier, but the increased density makes it seem heavier", I wouldn't have commented.
Not sure how old he is nor how advanced he is at writing, but my advice is that, as soon as he's ready, don't keep him just copying text.

Maybe find relatives/friends he can exchange letters with, get him to write a blog/diary kinda thing, get him to write about stuff that interests him.
Something like news in a thread? Interesting idea - though a hard challenge when the content is not streamlined by a single contributor.
How much "keeping things running" is actually needed? I'd imagine disappearing completely for a couple months wouldn't work, but what about a couple months of signing on only on Monday mornings?
Band Apps Get Sound Around [Launch]
Well, part of the reason that Joost failed is that when I tried to install it, the program didn't do much other than crash. I mean that literally, it didn't do anything other than crash. I never once saw Joost run successfully on my bland Vista install.
Initially I decided to go without comments. I haven't considered Disqus in the first place as it's too much everything for me so I would have to go and hide various stuff via CSS (and keep it updated). Also I am not a fan of JavaScript loading after the fact. I also generally like blogs without comments and didn't want them on my blog.

But then it hit me, why not use HN for comments? Everything clicked in and I decided to go that route. At least experimentally for now.

Two downsides:

1. One has to have an account here. This is partially mitigated by having the reply box available even if you are not logged in or registered, encouraging to comment/log in/open an account.

2. One has to self-submit.

Additional benefit is that HN contains a target audience I am interested in, thus making comments better but also forcing me to post better stuff.