skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like the part where he speaks about how one should be one's own surrogate customer. It is very difficult to be on the same track when starting a startup. Only if it is pain point for you, you will try to find the right solution.
Back in the 70’s I started a burglar alarm company - I had the knowledge and there was a need in my geographic area for another provider.

I’ve been self employed on and off ever since. At 63 I’m having trouble finding a new business to start, not because I lack the drive, or ability to start a company but in this location and economic times I’m having trouble finding a way to leverage my knowledge and abilities into a new endeavor.

I suspect that a lot of your programers just haven’t found their “big idea” yet. In computer related fields, the cost of entry is now so low that a huge percentage of programers have some idea they are playing with on the side. Like many actors, they will be overnight successes.
Apple Challenges NYC Bid for New `Big Apple' Logo
A Tinypy: a minimalist implementation of python in 64k of code
PostGres: High Availability, Load Balancing, and Replication
Is poverty self-perpetuating?
"the next facebook"
It's the glassy eyed, far off, hungry look. When you're trying to geek out with someone about web stuff, and it seems like they're just looking through you and throwing out buzz words... it's time to exit stage left.
More undergraduates are majoring in philosophy
A powerful bot enables JobArray to collect jobs without prior cooperation with content publishers
Well, go find and submit some better stories then.
curl -I http://www.smugmug.com/test/safari/300k.jpg

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 06 Apr 2008 15:16:43 GMT
Server: Apache
Last-Modified: Mon, 17 Mar 2008 06:17:28 GMT
ETag: "4c00f-f9632e00"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 311311
Content-Type: image/jpeg

Bug? Why doesn't he add an Expires header?

http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#expires
Good article. I had seen the original from the Skype blog, but it was kind of empty. This was a good recap. Plus, it liked to SkyTools, which for some reason I had never heard of.
Waf: a Python-based framework for configuring, compiling and installing applications.
The True Price of SMS Messages
in the same vein as gdb is strace, another lifesaver if you're on almost any nix box
yahoo's board is in trouble, but it doesn't seem as if the shareholders are. either the merger will go through at $31/share, which is pretty good (even for those who got in at $29/share)--or the shareholders will get to vote on it in a proxy fight. the only losers in the latter scenario are those who vote in opposition to the final result. but whichever result that is, a majority of the shareholders will have believed in that outcome (either higher value with existing management or higher value with microsoft's offer) such that that outcome might actually be plausible, and we can all go forward from there.
Yes, it is a famous misquote. "God" to Einstein was the universe.
Jessica Alba and monkeys!
What was this tool use for?
doesn't this resemble A-A-P (http://www.a-a-p.org/) by Bram Moolenaar?
I stopped reading when I saw "Code Complete".
Tell that to the families? Traces of sarcasm aside, police analysis showed him to have intelligence significantly above average. Sorry if you have a loftier value for the word 'brilliant'.
(1) This is very old news.

(2) If you are using MD5 OR SHA1 directly in any way, you almost certainly have systems problems that are much scarier than Xiaoyung Wang's attack.

If you're doing things right, this stuff shouldn't make any difference.
If your SWF file is over 200k maybe that's a bad idea to start with.
I don't get it. I've read Code Complete and it seemed like a fine enough book. What is your point?
He wrote, in the comments, that this doesn't fix the problem.

I did a local test with the first photo I came to and found the same:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pmorgan/32606683/sizes/l/

Even with the Expires header set, it re-requests the entire image.
Doesn't appear to, at first glance. I think it has much more in common with scons. A major selling point of waf is that you can put the whole build system as one file in your source tree, rather than requiring installation.
Ugh. First of all, "protaganists" is misspelled. Second, the word is either misused, or he has people who are like opponents primarily because they do Ruby. Thirdly, he was mistaken about the technical terms for describing what he was doing. All that said, I still find that it's an interesting hack.
From the comments on the site:

Don, You aren’t serving the files with any Cache-Control or Expires header ? Does it make any difference if you add those headers

@Yusuf Goolamabbas

Nope, makes no difference. :(
"Is there something about our culture that stifles innovation?" Many people would say yes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#Closing_of_the_Amer...
http://johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm

I was just talking about this yesterday with a friend who's a labour & delivery nurse, and she says in her experience all babies, unless there is something wrong with them, have an innate curiosity about the world around them (I think that's the core element of the tinkering/improving mindset). How many people around you at 20 years old can you say that about? So that's a quality we lose, not something we never had.

Aside from the education discussion, there are certainly people with this drive still - it seems to me to be one of the core personality attributes of startup creators, for example. It just seems to be a rarely found still intact, unfortunately...
"Design Patterns" is poison.
Another list (mine):

1-4: Books on computer organization, operating systems, networks and distributed systems (I like the ones by Tanenbaum, but there are many).

5: Another about compilers/languages (the dragon book is a classic, but there are many others).

6: Something about Lispy-languages (e.g. SICP, but the Little/Seasoned Schemer is another favorite).

7: A book about algorithms. I have Knuth, but something less thorough covering a wider area may be preferable.

8: A book about the practice of programming. My favorite is The Pragmatic Programmer.

9: A book about software engineering as a profession (I recommend Peopleware.)
I'll have to think about others still (or turn around and look ;), but "Mastering Regular Expressions" (O'Reilly) really helped me many moons ago. I just bought the latest edition recently to see what's new, and to finally have a copy for my shelf.
this article is much more accurate than the ones i've seen on HN about poverty in the past. still doesn't hit the nail on the head, but its a lot closer.
Simply can't understand how you could be charged for incoming SMS. That is just perverse. Who would get a phone like that??
A lot of this stuff seems really obvious, but having worked in the game industry, the general view seems to be that "that would all be nice if we could do it". In particular, the quality feedback loop is often sorely missing. This is why there are so many mediocre to bad games. I suspect the reason for this disparity between theory and practice at most publisher-independent studios is some mixture between the iron grip of publishers on developers, and developers' reluctance to even try to do anything about it. Maybe I've missed something though, few of the politics ever seeped through to programmers. (apart from "you're not working hard enough")
Does anyone here know about the economics of gambling?
It seems like the argument Karelis is making would have strong similarities there. I'd be interested to see if this suggestion is at all valid.

To explain, in gambling (think lottery tickets, not poker) you trade $1 for something that actually has less than $1 worth of economic value. There is obviously another component at work (behavioral, not economic), call it hope. If economists have found a way to quantify hope in this context it seems that they could try the same thing with poverty, the results would certainly be interesting.
The whole article could have been shortened to this one paragraph:

In the early 1970s, a large-scale study gave poor people in four cities a so-called "negative income tax," a no-strings-attached payment based on how little money they made. The conclusion: the aid tended to discourage work.

Yeah, that's right. The obvious occurred, as usual. All such theories, and all such fawning articles, rely upon one unalterable precondition: Nobody involved has actually lived among the destitute, while destitute.
Agreed. People read it and thing they're reading a how-to rather than a dictionary.
Where I work, lots of our big customers want code written in "ladder logic" instead of "structured text". Yes, I'm serious.
How can startups identify golden ideas?
It's a Sunday afternoon, guy. All of these top stories have only a few points. I don't think a Sunday afternoon is representative of quality here.
I strongly agree. This is one of the better essays on why: http://blog.plover.com/2006/09/11/

One point it unfortunately doesn't cover is the large percentage of Go4 patterns that are just plain bad ideas. Singleton, for example, should just never be used: it's like relying too much on global variables, but worse.
I don't want to go into details, because things would quickly get biographical, but the real danger is that the book is written with faux-scientific verbiage, and uses that to trick weak-minded people into thinking that they are reading a scientific text. This is an old trick of conmen and cultists and when it works it isn't pretty.
I'm not sure what to think. On the one hand it's great that students are realizing they don't need to take something that seems pragmatic in college/university, but on the other, I wonder if they're really learning anything useful other than how to bullshit.
I always find these articles on mathematics pretty dissatisfying. It's just not possible to describe the math, except through metaphor and hand-waving. It's a pity: things like this look fascinating from the outside, but I have neither the time nor the talent to learn the math involved. So I'll always be reading along, thinking "that's a nice metaphor. Wonder if it has any connection to the real stuff"
Good example with Apple. But Apple was also a hardware company-- there are a few more biz things to take care of when you're a computer manufacturing startup.

FWIW, I'm speaking from experience. I'M THAT GUY-- if there is a non-technical thing to do at my startup, I do it. And if I didn't have the chops to do design, copywriting, and some light coding, I really wouldn't have 10 hours of early-stage work to do. Not that a biz guy couldn't keep himself busy-- I just think it'd be with non-critical work in the early days.

Doubtless someone will say that a good biz guy would find critical work to fill up that 10 hours per day with, but I've yet to hear someone tell me what they'd fill it with.

Am I missing something? Pick the 20 best YC startups. Rewind to day 1. Add a business guy. What would he do? I can think of a very few startups where a biz guy would be handy (like SnapTalent), but...
What about less code-specific books, like "Cathedral & the Bazaar"? I find my shelf ends up with a fair amount of these compared to code/code theory books.

I'm also reading "Programming Collective Intelligence" right now which is pretty awesome so far!
Safari Books Online Review
To the weak of mind, perhaps. I believe that patterns are useful and beneficial in moderation. This requires a degree of understanding that some do not have, leading to pattern hell.

The analogies to alcohol are disturbing.
13 Startup CEOs discussing Web 2.0
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Ask YC: What methods do you use to manage your time?
I've been trying GTD.
Unlimited text messaging plans are a couple bucks a month.
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Given how many people here are philosophy majors (lots), it can't be an entirely bad thing.

And provided you treat it as 'figuring out how to argue rationally about difficult topics' rather than 'being able to namecheck dead philosophers', it's probably as useful as any other non-applied degree course.
What choice do you have? All the carriers charge like that so I don't really have an option.

I wish one of those companies would just stand up above the rest and not suck. They are all so shitty. All the new phones in america suck. I'm still using a super old nokia and I was going to upgrade it, but all the phones at the store were all pathetic. At least congress made it easy to switch to a new carrier because of the number-portability bill.

I'm with verizon right now, who generally have a great network, but I would drop them in a heartbeat if something better came around. However i hear nothing but bad things about AT&T (nee Cingular) and sprint usually doesn't have the best coverage, although I have thought of switching to them because they have some great plans. T-Mobile isn't any better either.
Great interview Sam!
A VC: The Declining Power Of The Firm
I mirrored the files to my server and Safari reloads the images on restart.

http://3banana.com/pics/cache_test/jpgtest.html

YSlow gives the page a score of 98, so I know the headers are being set properly.

Okay, that is bloody weird.
To me, the value of Loopt isn't so much that if you want to meet up with a friend you already know where they are. Instead, it's if you're in a coffee shop and you notice that your friend is in the book store 100 feet away, you can take advantage of that opportunity. As Sam says, it's surprising how there are typically close friends in your general vicinity that you wouldn't know were there otherwise. SMS can't replicate this behavior.
Actually, that's the opposite of what the article is arguing (or to be more accurate, what the guy who the article is about is arguing).

Direct quote:

Reducing the number of economic hardships that the poor have to deal with actually make them more, not less, likely to work, just as repairing most of the dents on a car makes the owner more likely to fix the last couple on his own. Simply giving the poor money with no strings attached, rather than using it, as federal and state governments do now, to try to encourage specific behaviors - food stamps to make sure money doesn't get spent on drugs or non-necessities, education grants to encourage schooling, time limits on benefits to encourage recipients to look for work - would be just as effective, and with far less bureaucracy.

What you quoted was a common rebuttal to the argument above, which the guy in the article counters with:

Karelis responds that the data from that experiment is in fact quite ambiguous, and there has been debate among economists over how to interpret the results. But ultimately, he believes, the strength of his arguments is less in how they fit with the economic work that's been done to date on poverty - much of which he is suspicious of anyway - but in how familiar they feel to all of us, rich or poor.

* Edit: Formatted quotes, thought I could use Markdown.
Computer Program Reveals Anyone's Ancestry
A response: http://wirkman.net/wordpress/?p=295

"By the way, vice in any form is self-reinforcing, as he suggests. Ancient moralists realized it; modern “mental health” professionals do, too. The behavior of poor people is often that of simple vice. It is not new, nor are the traps involved.

Example? Think of becoming fat: the fatter you get, the harder it is to exercise, the less incentive you have to exercise; the less you exercise, the fatter you get. You get caught in a feedback loop that spirals into imbalance and self-destruction. Sloth and gluttony (the old terms for two major causes of being overweight) are not new nor are they hard to understand."

(Please note that I am not agreeing with or endorsing this opinion, merely providing a link)
that's the opposite of what the article is arguing

Exactly. If I wanted to summarize the argument of the article I would translate from newspeak to English:

We want to pay right-thinking, liberal arts majors middle class salaries for them to administer money distributions from functional people to dysfunctional people. We have no data to suggest this will help anyone, but we are pretty sure it will help ourselves.
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Yahoo expanding Zimbra team
I agree, among people my age (20s) that natural curiosity is almost completely lost. But I think its more than just the education, I think its what our society rewards and punishes. People who want to "change the world" have to take a lot of risks. But yet, everything about our society (government, education, friends) seem to frown upon taking big risks and reward living safely with some 9 to 5 job.

For instance, there are so many pretty good programmers in my classes. Yet not one wants to start a startup or do something significant in this world. They all simply want to get a 9 to 5 job at a Google or Microsoft. Why? Probably because its so much safer to work at Google than try to create the next Google.
I'm a bit disappointed that he didn't include IPoAC (IP over Avian Carriers) in his comparisons.

Sure it is high latency, but the bandwidth is killer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
Video: College Student Builds Paintball Tank
"In challenging decades of poverty research, Karelis draws on some economic data and some sociological research. But, more than that, he makes his case as a philosopher, arguing by analogy and induction."

This, for me, is the biggest problem with the article.
Poverty as it exists in America today is mostly a matter of breeding and culture. A thousand words on poverty and no mention of heritability? Drake either has his head up his ass or his PC blinders on too tight.
I don't understand ..

"rather than requiring installation." of what?
The problem is that people are notoriously bad at inductive reasoning. They routinely ignore cases that contradict their hypothesis.

If they see a woman who's bad at math, they think "aha! the stereotype is right!". If they see a woman who's good at math, they think, "oh well, there's bound to be exceptions" and promptly forget about her. They only remember the ones that fit the stereotype, so the stereotype is reinforced.

You need to repeatedly hammer irrefutable evidence into people's heads before they'll start to forget stereotypes.
The fact is, this kind of calculation shows how absurd the mobile market is in the USA. So much for claiming that it's a "free market" and it is "competitive".
I actually like Code Complete, too. But my point is, I doubt anyone ever became a better hacker for reading it. Compare to the Dragon book, which, if you haven't read a book on compilers, is virtually guaranteed to make you better.
Right-o, to read between the lines here:

"Dysfunctional" people are poor because they deserve it, because they are dysfunctional and have not earned anything. "Functional" people are wealthy because they are functional and have earned their wealth.

Let's take a look at a time in one's life before anything can be earned or deserved: At birth, does one newborn somehow deserve better education, improved nutrition, and a life that will offer far more opportunities and fewer hardships than some other child?

No, of course not: By your own ethos, you only deserve what you have earned. There is no way to make a moral argument that newborns deserve anything other than equal circumstances to begin to create a life for themselves. (Unless you are the sort who believes you chose your parents well and deserve the just rewards of that choice....)

Even for the Ayn-Rand libertarian there's a pretty compelling case to be made for widespread welfare efforts: not for the poor, who may have earned their own hardships, but for their children who will suffer without having done a thing to deserve it.
The article makes a very good point. I like the dents-in-the-car metaphor. I don't, however, agree with how he interpreted it. If I have a car with, say, ten dents in it, and I get one more, no, I am not inclined to try to fix it. And let us follow his story, and say that someone comes along and fixes all but two of those dents for me.

The question is, does the fact that I have fewer dents in my car make me more likely to fix the others? If someone comes along and does almost all of my dishes for me, am I more likely to wash the last few myself?

I believe the answer to that is not, as Bennett suggests, "Yes."

If someone comes along and fixes most of my car for me, or cleans most of my dishes, when I had no inclination of doing it myself, why would I stop them? If someone is going to come and fix my problems for me, why do it myself? All you have to do is wait long enough, and, like magic it's done for you!

So while it is an interesting theory, the problem is, people become set in their habits fairly quickly. If I do not wash my dishes one day, I am not really more inclined to wash them the next. Indeed, why should I? There is suddenly an almost empty sink in which to store the dirty ones.
Once again, with feeling: goods and services aren't priced based on their cost to the provider. They are priced based on what the market values them at.

Analyses like this are silly. The marginal cost of a single SMS message is effectively zero. Why compare them to ISP rates? Those are arbitrary too. Take the argument to its logical conclusion and SMS should be free. I agree!
I find GTD extremely attractive, but any attempt to implement it in my life (and I've tried a few times), has been an abject failure. A few things I've found helpful, though, to minimizing time-wasting generally are:

1) Stop playing video games, or if you can't bear the thought, add some "friction" to make it harder to do without thinking (in my case, I have a few favorite Windows games, but since I have a MacBook, I need to open a VM to play the game. That additional requirement forces me to think whether I really have the time to do it.

2) Do repetitive tasks in groups (sort of obvious).

and 3) (I've had some success with this, but it's extremely hard to stick to) Don't leave your email client open unless you absolutely have to- continually interrupting the current task to see the most recent ad from Amazon, or some email forward, is a huge time sink. Surprisingly few emails are actually urgent.
I would be interested in seeing you defend this argument. What's better about your favorite mobile market?
Explaining Exploratory Testing
Third Annual Silicon Valley Ruby Conference: 4/18-19 in San Jose
You've taken one small part of the article - the part that has the least to do with any of the rest of it, and which was given by the author as a counterpoint, not a supporting point - and tried to pass it off as the crux of the whole article. Shame on you.
But some of the very things you need to live will kill you if you consume too much of them.

The problem is people often use the Design Patterns book as a design manual but that's not what it really is - it's an attempt to catagorize ideas. The very fact that you used the term Singleton means that now you and I can argue the merits of using that pattern in different situations. Would you rather us attempt to do that without common terminology?
I'm not sure why that got down-voted. It's a true statement.
I've come to the conclusion that the carriers are our generation's Big Blue.

You need to work with them (like Microsoft did), but really, they're stifling creativity and I don't think anyone would be sorry to see them lose some of their power.
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I use Things as a task manager as a sort of 'GTD-light'. I haven't found the need to follow any particular system religiously.

I also use RescueTime to keep me in line.
Offhand, it doesn't smell like hacker news to me. Here's why: it's already touched off a thread on politics. I'm not convinced that these things don't degrade with time. And I am certain that in any case, as hackers, our "comparative advantage" is not in discussing politics.
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