skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd be interested to have the question answered, what is different for the hyper productive coders? Is it a certain approach or a way to think - maybe?

For example: if I have work to do that really interests me, I hack it down in no time. I can also speed my work up a lot, if I sit down in the morning and make a plan what I want to do and how I want to do it. The mental focus is completely different then: Its a competition with me, if I can stick to my plan and really get as far as I thought. Often it works fine.

On the other hand, if I have some really boring work to do, or I have to work with libraries which are full of errors and I spend my time debugging other peoples crappy code, it may take forever to get something done.

The problem is to work only on interesting things or to find something interesting everywhere. For example, if the coding is simple, I try to use a new and more efficient pattern to solve the problem. But it is not always possible to work like that.

What do you think?
Code on the Road: Laid off? The one thing you absolutely need to do on the first day
The key of the tax strategy is still how they manage to get to the money without it being considered profit or salary, and all the article says about it is it's a "convoluted multi-national system of ownership". Still an interesting read.
Ask YC: How important are HN contribution to YC applications?
Do people's contributions to Hacker News have weight in the decision if all else is equal?
This seems to be a summary with fluff and bad jokes. Here is the actual article:

http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=...

Edit: apologies if I mispreresented mentalfloss.com. They did not add jokes -- they merely rephrased the same joke that kicks off the Economist article.
Flat-pack accounting
"There's nothing wrong with selling copies I don't think."

As long as that's what your buyer thinks he's paying for, right.

But if he thinks he's paying for custom work and you deliver something already made for someone else, I'd call that a problem.
Not To Be Outdone By Digg, MySpace Says They Do DataPortability
Heroku is awesome. PG says "make something people want", and Heroku definitely embodies that for me. Congrats to them!!
what about a tool that you enter 'instances' in (say, a few examples of valid email addresses) and it gives you the most specific regex that matches all of them
Don't underprice yourself. If half the people you give your prices / figures to don't say "fuck you" then you aren't in the right price bracket.
= things falling out of the sky in random places.
Vendors Fight Medicare on Competitive Bids for Medical Equipment
Thats awesome. You have done a great service to all the hackers here in YC. Great work. Thanks.
There is a famous saying from the Army: "You don't rise to the occasion, you fall (or default) to your level of training".
I agree with you. This seems to be a complete ripoff of the Economist article. http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=184934

I bet we'll see more of this sort of "paraplagiarism" on the web. You could get a lot of traffic by finding old Economist articles about comparatively evergreen topics and paraphrasing them in a more sensationalist way. The average reddit/digg upvoter would never know. Does Mentalfloss often do this?
Wow, thanks! That's a great list!
I think what he's saying is that they haven't paid sufficient attention to how well they generalize. That's the other half of essay writing.
Android will be open after they release the source. Right now the hype has gotten a little ahead of reality.
Oh right, he clearly understands that I am doing that. I'm not trying to be sly or anything.
how do I know what I am working on is not inconsequential features?

Get the thing in front of users. Usually this means launching, but it could be enough to use what you're making in-house.
Mobiln looks pretty interesting as well. http://www.moblin.org/

Built on Intel's Atom platform
"where should I hit the cue ball?"

Immediate entry into my book of useful analogies! Thanks!
The Terrible Legacy of Legacy
what is the contradiction you are saying that my position contains?
+1. Thanks for the effort. For newer members like myself this definitely helps - which also helps the older members since I am not reposting.
"they think towards the money, just as a plant grows toward sunlight"

Another fantastic analogy - that's two in one thread!
Yes, at least in getting from the application to the interview phase. What matters is not so much the karma score as whether we recognise the username as someone who often submits good links or makes intelligent comments.
Very interesting, and good job there! I was contemplating doing something similar, but got diverted with other things. Would you share a bit more about your experience with using dbpedia?

Are you querying dbpedia for the tags? If not, how deep do your tags cross-link?
Experience has one big advantage: it is possible to write a lot of code in one chunk that

- compiles with few or no errors

- needs very little or no debugging

Especially not having to debug speeds up progress tremendously. Debugging can be really boring.
Cool. I hope you found what you're looking for here. Let us know how you work things out.
Even more Ruby on Rails investment: Heroku gets $3M
Most of the articles on mainstream tech news sites like CNet and the Register are already rephrased press releases or summaries of articles written by actual journalists. Why should we expect bloggers to behave any better?

For example, check out this article that doesn't even bother to hide the fact that it was completely copied from EE Times: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2008/04/28/will-the-fe...
Why not just link to the original? Oh yeah, pageviews.

cf. http://publishing2.com/2008/05/04/the-declining-value-of-red...
Let's go on the assumption .NET MVC/mssql is comparable to rails/mysql or django/postgres in quality, performance, time to build, etc.

How could anyone consider using the option that is not free and open source?
Fishing Frenzy in Illinois | Technology Blog and more
Buying facebook would be a nice play, but it would be more like putting all your eggs into one basket as yahoo has more unique properties, including gems like flickr.

However, many people feel the future of search is through social networks, that is, seeing what my friends think/have bought before I go off on my own to try and figure things out is a pretty compelling reason to invest in a high growth social network.

Although I'm sure most MS engineers are sweating given facebook's platofrm.

It comes down to facebooks long term viability as a property on the net.
I'm fairly certain Tony Wright of RescueTime sold a design/programming consultancy a few years back. If you can find a buyer, why not go for it. The extra cash could provide capital to your new venture.
The *AA don't understand technology and don't really want to. Many people think that DRM is about preventing copies, but it's actually about showing good faith. That's why they allowed Apple to use a DRM system that is much weaker than their competitors: Steve Jobs gave them the impression that he was on their side and that's all they wanted.

MS is just taking it to the next level. They promise to investigate some watermark technology (that they know won't work) and get some concessions from NBC in exchange.
The HN userbase is extremely unique in the richness of experience of its users. There are many successful people here in a wide range of areas on all things Internet.

Identifying the value from the nonsense however may take a bit of effort for some people. I do believe that this is still an excellent resource for viable opinions.
Auctomatic Founder's Internet Addiction - Are you Addicted?
I admire the "no style" style. A touch of good typography, and it turns out very pleasant to read.
There is a strong potential market for your application. If you are looking for help, once you sort out the ownership issues, I would be interested.
Great resource! Hope you don't mind, we added a link to your wiki on http://ask.searchyc.com
http://www.crunchboard.com/opening/detailjob.php?jid=4125
My opinion is if you can do what you love for a living, and get through the tough times, it's worth it. Trust me, there is a very small fraction of humanity that can actually "do what they love" and get through life... most of them are fighting for basic necessities that we take for granted.

the rest are just mindless zombies doing the 9-5 grind just trying to procreate.

Do what you love, worry about the rest later - it's all insignificant in the end, if you ever doubt that, just look up at the sky at night and realize the scale in which your perceived problems reside in.
This is my plan precisely. It'll be Ghana for me. A surprising amount of the third world has a decent internet connection these days. If you can get that plus a decent hotel room for a few hundred bucks a month, why not give it a shot?
Could be a gambit to play at Yahoo!'s insecurity. You know, how you start acting like you're going out with another girl to make your ex jealous.
It's my understanding that the copyright for schoolwork always belongs to its original authors; it does not become property of the school.
I would love to see some of this cash go towards supporting simple db or couch as an alternative to Postgres for some app types.

I love Heroku. Some of their opensource bits are nice too. I'm enjoying building my app in the cloud.
That's the main reason that I also stayed out of the games industry, even though playing games is what lead me into programming during high school.

One thing that always makes me wonder about the perpetual crisis mode folks is that the vast majority of them despise Microsoft for producing such low-quality products, but follow exactly the same microserf development model that lead Microsoft to doing that.

A lot of the developers working there left as soon as their options vested, and for years MS has been paying the price in terms of maintenance overhead and a plethora of security holes and bugs in released software, which has lead to a reputation for having software that's full of security holes on top of everything else.

Joel Spolsky has also commented on the value of encouraging developers to work sane hours rather than sweatshop hours, though I don't know which of his articles it was in.
Code on the Road: Two Weeks Vacation is only a Recommendation, not a Rule
i'm actually going to be doing just that. my employer (10-20 employees) was nice enough to grant my request to let me telecommute from brazil for a few months.

how's that for relaxed management?

i could not agree with this article more. people need to loosen up and go see the world much more than they currently do. farecast is a great place to buy plane tickets and couchsurfing is a great place to find a roof.

go out and enjoy yourself!
We just added support for Piwik to Virtualmin. It's got a little while to go before it's a match for Google Analytics, but it makes great use of the latest in Open Source tools (like Open Flash Chart, which is a nice charting library)...and it still has the "needs a JavaScript bug" negative, though, realistically, there's no way to get all the data without one...but if you use more than one analytics package you end up spending a lot of time loading JS bugs on first visit.

I think I'd generally prefer locally generating my analytics reports. All that data has value (otherwise Google wouldn't want it so badly), and it probably has more value if it only belongs to me, though I may not be sure exactly how to make use of it.
It is now completely impossible to sell a laptop on eBay
Some interesting remarks on Reddit as well:

http://reddit.com/info/6inwx/comments/
Venture Capitalists Don’t Want You to Have a Sex Life - are you kidding me
This is why I hope to be earmarking half a million for a trip around the world in a few years. I may only end up using a tenth of that, but I don't want to limit myself in terms of activities: scuba diving, mountain climbing, safaris, maybe a few expensive hotels, foreign clubbing, etc.

All with a laptop at hand.
Seth, I have updated your Passion/Pop Curve
This whole obsession with 'social apps' and the next Twitter/Digg/FriendFeed/XYX killer is really a product of the tech echo chamber. Lets forget all that and build products for the mainstream. I'm really focused on trying to build something that the masses want, not just the niche techie/early adopter crowd. Forget the fun, unless its in 'fundamental'...riiiiight.
"or can't tell his father to tone things down a bit."

If he can't tell his father that a 17 page contract for a $400 gig is inappropriate and counter-productive, then he's no business partner worth having.
So, EBay is broken (at least when it comes to computers & electronics).

There must be a startup opportunity there.
Haha. The article is hilarious. Definitely a good afternoon chuckle.
High Performance Multithreaded Access to Amazon SimpleDB
Maybe that's an opportunity to revamp the way karma is done?
Rails, Django, CakePHP, Merb... they're all the same. Rails just "inspired" a new generation of web application frameworks.

It wouldn't surprise me if most of Heroku's technology translated to other stacks easily.
I'm in total agreement with you and pg. If they had linked to the original, I would have instead. Thanks for tracking it down.
You can keep it, if you intend to keep working on it. But don't sign the crazy contract, and don't agree that what you're building belongs to your friend except as it pertains to his use as a school project. If you want to commercialize it (and maybe if he wants to be involved), you should retain all rights to do so...and it sounds like any contract that involves your roommates father isn't going to be acceptable--he's a lawyer who thinks his son farts rainbows...you need to set the terms. I don't mean "go over the 17 page contract of doom with a pen and make a few changes"...I mean start from a blank page, specify the terms, state your ownership position (100% unless you want to partner with this cat on a future business), and hand it over. It'll only be one page, so even his dad will be able to understand it.
7 Sure Fire Signs Your Company Is Screwed
The noise reduction system
Heh, I get the same thing. I am launching a service based business. Someday I am going to thank the 25 VC firms that gave me that "more traction" statement as I bootstrap the business.
"b) Would not the college own the IP anyway?"

Only if OP were employed by the school for the creation of that IP. University research grants often have a commercialization clause in them that requires some involvement of the school in the event a product results from the research...but independently funded projects certainly do not fall into this category.
VCs analyze opportunities largely by pattern recognition. They detect correlations between their past successes and then ride them for all they're worth when looking at new deals. The "no sex life" thing is a particularly peculiar correlation that Doerr is focusing on, but his process of pattern recognition investing is pretty normal.

Important to note: these patterns and correlations, not causations, and no one is claiming them to be causations. Doerr clearly does not think that "nerdy, white, no sex life" necessarily leads to "billion dollar dot-com success". As Founders at Work (Jessica Livingston's book) very clearly outlines, successful founders look very different from each other and take very different paths to success.
I'm of the opinion that TechCrunch knows a thing or two about technology. But writing sensationalist headlines and then attracting all the loons to come out and post comments about Rails suck and so on...

My point is this: some people look to TC as an authority now and when the articles and comments reflect one perspective on something it's going to sway some people.
While it's impressive to see the WSJ trying to adapt to the web, this kind of cheesy, recycled linkbait doesn't seem like the right plan. It's like a middle-aged guy trying to dress like a high school kid.
How to Get Microsoft Office at 91 Percent Off
Believe me, if I could think of a way to make karma more accurately reflect the value of comments, I'd already have done it.
code+hobbies and the people you find you like along the way.

make sure to stay physically fit. learning physical balance can help your life balance. try slacklining.

programming is very brain-intensive. make sure to give your body its due, too. the rest will fall into place over time.
I don't have specific links. It's more of a vibe over the past few months of reading reddit and this site. Ruby, in general, seems to be getting put aside. BUT, what would i know?!
towel thrower!
RescueTime (YC '08) releases aggregate data for the first time
Buried Prejudice: The Bigot in Your Brain
Essentially, the problem is a credentials issue. If you can distinguish "serious" buyers from the "scammers," then you're set. I've done a little freelancing on elance.com, and the way they handle this problem is that they charge a small amount to make bids. Of course, this is somewhat different since one is bidding for jobs and not items (receiving money, not giving it), but it's still not very helpful, since I doubt anyone would pay even a nominal fee to make bids for buying items. Craiglist's solution to this problem is to limit buyers and sellers to their respective local geographic areas, which turns out to be pretty effective, but can oftentimes constrain market opportunities (and of course, there's no built-in auctioning capabilities).

I remember one post on YC a while back was about generating post modernism essays in response to spam emails to the point where a spammer could not possibly sift through all of them in a reasonable amount of time (and the "English" nature of the essays would make them hard to distinguish from real responses). This would make spamming unprofitable. Perhaps this can somehow be generalized to problems like s(c|p)ammers on eBay.
To this day I will not understand why Microsoft product managers like to use non-microsoft.com domains for their promotions. It's just not a good idea -- so much trust is involved in a good trusted URL -- why throw it away?
"Confusion creates opportunity" as they say...
I'm at the airport now! Going to europe!
welcome to human society.
I've been putting off buying a house or making any big commitments like that for precisely this reason. Doin' the startup thing right now, but there's no reason why that can't happen from wherever I happen to be too. Working on a plan to free myself geographically sometime in '09!
And hell, if you could solve that problem, you'd have a legitimate PayPal alternative as well.
I chose Microsoft initially because it's what I knew best at the time, so it was the fastest way to get a working demo out the door. Then I stuck with it because:

SQL Server 2005: The only other options were PostgreSQL and Oracle. MySQL 5 had just come out and all the basic database features I intended to use (stored procedures, foreign key constraints, etc) were new, and thus untested. Oracle cost a fortune (I think I was quoted $65k/core as my only licensing option). SQL Server was a natural choice.

ASP.Net: At the time the only other well tested equivalent was Java, and my brief examination of it led me to believe it was basically equivalent for my purposes. It wasn't worth the switching cost. Rails was really new and also required full access to the database, which I don't grant to our web servers. PHP is extraordinarily difficult to keep clean when working in a team on a large project, so it wasn't really suitable (especially for the cell phone portion, which uses packed binary protocols). Python web frameworks were still in their infancy, or I would have chosen it.

C#: It's fine for a statically type language. I like that it's similar to Java, but a little more relaxed (delegates, unsigned types, etc.). I'm actually a horrible typist (20 WPM on a good day), so intellisense (increase speed) and compilation (find typos) were key. The .NET framework is actually really good and rivals Java's. MSDN docs are much more useful than JavaDocs in that they actually contain examples :)

Now, don't get me wrong. We're not a 100% Microsoft shop. We use Erlang (fault tolerant, distributed session state store), PHP (tile serving), Memcache, Apache (static content and PHP), PostgreSQL, Ubuntu and FreeBSD.

As for open versus closed source, not having access to the Microsoft source code has yet to be an issue. We've had to work around things once or twice (usually because what we were doing wasn't in the spirit of the framework), but we've never encountered an actual bug, and Microsoft's products have always worked as documented thus far. I'd rather not need source access than have to use it to get something working ;)

Ironically, the places where we've had problems are on the open source side. PHP x86 != PHP x64 (same release version, different behavior) on some distributions (cough RHEL cough), and PostgreSQL on FreeBSD 6 is anything but straightforward (max connection limit problems).
It's funny how obsessed some people become with languages and frameworks, and how people using 'in vogue' ones are applauded, whilst those using perfectly capable but 'out of vogue' ones are looked down upon.

I agree though, I think the "This is the best thing since sliced bread" phase is over for rails.
Essentially, the problem is a credentials issue. If you can distinguish "serious" buyers from the "scammers," then you're set.

Maybe... but I can't help but note that anonymous cash transactions do happen all the time successfully (albeit in person, at shops).

So perhaps credentialed id is not the answer, especially since, on the web it's easy to go back and create a new account at any time.

I doubt anyone would pay even a nominal fee to make bids for buying items

Maybe listing fees (whether paid by buyer or seller) is the wrong business model.

Anyway, it's worth a rethink along the lines of "can you redefine the problem?"
AskBINC Seattle
Another data point. I just sold mine a year ago and had no problems.

I bought a laptop and 3 months later got a work laptop negating my need for the other. Sold it on ebay at a loss of just 50 bucks from the original price. Yet another reason to buy a mac. The resale value remains really high.
Yahoo Employees Staying Put For Now
Seems more like bad thinking than bad clothing.
What about weighting votes based on karma + time on site? So the top 10 contributors would have karma votes that count for more than someone new to the site?
Before you've launched you can use the development versions. Once you've moved into an office the licensing cost doesn't really matter relative to other expenses.

We spend 13 times more money on cell phone contracts per month at Loopt than we do on MS software licensing (Office, Exchange, Windows Server, VS 2008, SQL Server, etc). Payroll is astronomically more. If the relatively minuscule amount of money you're saving from not licensing MS software makes a difference, I'd argue that you have bigger problems :)

There definitely are valid reasons not to use the MS stack, but cost isn't one of them in most cases. We've saved enough time by using it to more than cover its cost.

[Edit]
For more on cost, look into the Service Provider License Agreement. You pay per month and only for what you used.

http://www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/licensing/default....
* Maybe listing fees (whether paid by buyer or seller) is the wrong business model.

That's called craigslist...
I'm not sure that I see that as fair.

Why is it just because you've been around for 5 years that your opinions should be greater than those of someone of 5 minutes? or that they should be greater than those who are too busy to spend every waking moment on HN. This would actually allow trolls who have nothing better to do to have better karma than those who actually make intelligent comments.

I think the karma system is fine, and in fact better than some others. The only thing I'd change is the # of karma points something need to get into the rss feed.