skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have done it quite extensively. Productivity depends on your pair. If the other person is "like-minded", the results are amazing, otherwise, its quite frustrating.
I think a small vignette from Clerks says it best:

Dante Hicks: "Theoretically, people see money on the counter, and no one around, they think they're being watched."

Veronica: "Honesty through paranoia."
The Audiogalaxy Chronicles
Or at least against the "more is better" school of thought. 100 lines of Lisp is, however, a non-trivial chunk of code..
I'm thumbs up on question mark reposts, personally. That said, you can't really knock the original submitter for linking to this excerpt. There's a lot of value in highlighting just the important part...
If you comments had the same weight as the initial blog you would have a forum. seriously they don't realize that? (read comments on blog)
is the url broken? what are you trying to show us?
Twitter Account + Followers For Sale On eBay
I've been through most of the rails books, at least partway, and none of them is a great programming book. The classic, AWDWR from pragmatic programmers is a bit out of date, otherwise I would recommend it. The "Rails in depth" chapters there are quite useful and could be taken out and used as a reference.

"The Rails Way" is a good book but the online version requires Adobe Digital Editions for the DRM and that interface is a pig. This book is clearly not intended as a first book on Rails, but you'll end up buying it if you do more than one project. There's supposed to be a new version coming out soon, so check out the date of publication.

I started Rails as one project of many, but I don't think that pollutes my fundamental finding: Learn Ruby First. In fact I'd like to put together a book of small Ruby tasks and samples to cover the language. The existing books are narrative-based.

The secret question for all Rails developers is: Should I learn the framework by looking at the source? Or should I code by reading the API docs? I started out as an old-fashioned software-is-a-contract guy and tried to build code by following the docs. The docs aren't good enough. The site 'api.rubyonrails.org' has docs that include source, lacking only an on-screen search box.

Finally, a good IDE that indexes the rails source (and your source) to produce a sort of visual-etags would be very useful. I haven't found one I like. That is, I would like to click on my call to 'number_to_currency' and have it bring up the source code in another window frame. I haven't found a solution I like.
MySQL 5.1 to be released next week
http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html
No, we really don't. We want to leave that sort of thing there, where it belongs, and where people can participate if they so choose. Bringing it here would be a Bad Idea.
I find it astonishing that many here seem so ignorant of the looming crisis and the consequences. In a twisted way I actually welcome the turbulence that it will bring, many have been in recession for years, so it wont make much difference to them, but all you who are looking forward to VC backing should be a little more concerned. Mind you, most of the ideas that are currently being backed seem little more than pipe dreams, and as for a 15 billion dollar valuation of FB, I think that has some merit, of course I also predict that a couple of years where inflation of US dollar outstrips that of zimbabway.
Enhancing Google Analytics Using Greasemonkey
ignorance is truly bliss
I don't think that a "current, hot, rapidly changing technology" often makes for a "great book", as great books tend to be classics. Just find something decent to get you up to speed and then follow the situation on line, as what you'll have in two years will make most books irrelevant in any case.

That's not to knock rails at all though, I use it exclusively at this point for web stuff.
A friend of mine worked at a company where he apparently presided over a month long flame war about what version control system to use. He got sick of it and just dictated that svn would be used, henceforth. I think people get altogether too excited about something that should be a fairly conservative part of your business. Innovation in source code management is not likely to be that big a win, although I guess if you're getting started, going with something more modern like git might be smart.
What girls?
This is what happens when you let programmers design interfaces (PNG)
This article from the economist has more meat:
http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...
Anyone want to get together this Friday in Mountain View?
We're having a meetup this Friday night before Startup School. If you're in town and want to get to know some of your fellow YCers, please feel free to stop by. Here's the link to the meetup:

http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1737/

See you soon.
Do Real People Really Use Tag Clouds?: Research To Help Separate Web 2.0’s Hits From Hype
I like it, though not with everyone and not all the time.

One thing I've observed that's a little counterintuitive is that pair programming works well for many introverts. While it's true that you're engaging with another person, it's equally true that both of you are focused on the ideas and the problem at hand. So it's not an open-ended social activity, but rather a partially social, structured activity. I find this comes more naturally than, say, making idle conversation.

Also, working together on something meaningful provides access to positive social interaction that doesn't necessarily come very often or very easily to the introvert. One can become quite attached to this. I miss it when I'm not working in a collaborative setting.
Wow, that's pretty brutal...

I think that an engineer can learn design, however. Certainly a standard CS education doesn't necessarily teach you those skills, but one can definitely develop them over time. It takes a good design sense and a good engineering capability to build great user experiences. Often you can't get that in one person, but when you can, one can accomplish that much more.
The Rails Way is a great reference, but not great for those totally fresh to it.

For total beginners, I recommend Sitepoint's Build Your Own Ruby on Rails book -- http://www.sitepoint.com/books/rails1/

Rails Way is great to fill out your Rails understanding from there, and then I recommend David Black's Ruby for Rails to fill out your Ruby understanding -- it will allow you to do so much more.
Regarding FTP I would say: FTP? WTF? It's 2008, isn't it?
I have never tried it, but I think people do high volume stuff there. If one rating costs 0.1$, 1000s should be doable? You should be able to constantly add new pictures, too, with the web services API they provide.

It seems likely to me, though, that if you complete the application and post it on digg, people will help you out in the name of science.
What do you use? Linux supports SSH in the command line/gui also...
I don't understand why "focus on mouse" is any better than Windows' ALT-Tab (to rapidly switch between windows)? It will switch between the two most recently-used windows, or, if you hold ALT, it will let you switch among all windows.

The best way to do window focus, tho, is, I think, to have you machine's camera notice where you are looking, and automatically raise that window - iris tracking and window raising.
Agreed. I had been running FreeBSD exclusively for well over 5 years before I switched to OS X. I can't say that I miss FreeBSD much. Still love it though, always will!
Actually, I believe that 50 LOC/person/day is a lot higher than the U.S. average.
Let me see... it's a classic story about a fascinating event in the history of a field that many people here find interesting and/or have studied. It's about a creative breakthrough that came about in an unanticipated, nonstandard way - something very much in the hacker ethos. It's information that many of us would never have run across if it hadn't been posted here (if it was posted before, I missed it). It even has a cameo by Knuth!

The story is in fact so relevant to Hacker News that it would be hard to imagine anything more in the spirit of the site.

The only thing lame about it is the title. The problems were obviously not unsolvable.

Edit: while I'm at it, a lot of people here are students, or were recently students, or are lifelong students. Many have spent time in the academic milieu described in the story and are familiar with this kind of folklore. The meme of the math professor assigning unsolved problems as homework is a familiar one.
The cryptanalysis of Malbolge is pretty impressive. At the end he even suggests some changes that would make the language even more difficult.

http://www.lscheffer.com/malbolge.shtml
He's going a lot further than the rest: acknowledging that the fundamental driver of economic growth for the past few decades (cheap money) is unsustainable.

Most people are predicting bad things about the housing market and the credit system, but stopping short of analyzing the implications; Soros is one of the few people taking the next logical step.
I had to use Everest for a year and it was the most painful thing ever. The website integration for it that I made was also really painful.
I am one of said ignorants. Can you point me to more info?
What do you mean? The url works for me.

Practicality hacks = rules of thumb
Isn't KISS always the key?
...while in Ubuntu you can install/uninstall Office and Adobe products via apt-get. Oh wait...
I've noticed the night effect for a long time too, and while the lack of interruptions might have something to do with it, I don't think it nearly explains my 3x boost in productivity.

I think there's something biological going on as well. Around 1 or 2 am, I sometimes get a bang of energy and creativity that I never get during the day. It's the "second wind," the injection (possibly) of cortisol and other stress hormones that cause my body to go into stress-protection mode. I become hypervigilant, which causes fewer bugs. I think more quickly, writing code faster and coming up with amazing design ideas instantly.

If you think about this from an evolutionary perspective, it makes perfect sense-- in the animal world, when you become stressed (i.e., a tiger comes up behind you, or you get exhausted looking for food) the outcome is binary: either you die or you live. So the body does extraordinary things to keep you alive, like make you temporarily smarter and more focused.

Over hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps, the body has developed in such a way that the lack of sleep for some number of hours (for me, almost exactly sixteen or seventeen hours) triggers the release of stress hormones which sacrifice the body's current state for mental and physical agility.

When will someone figure out how to hack my brain to make it like that all the time, without the nasty side effects (sleep deprivation) the next day?

More info:

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/502825

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortisol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norepinephrine

I should do more research on this.
You could also argue that launchd, specifically, is a divorce from the UNIX way of doing things. init starts processes based on system events, xinetd starts processes based on network requests and cron starts processes based on time. launchd is a monolithic solution that is decidedly unUNIXy, however cool and attractive a centralized solution may be. It would be nice if these different programs had a common file format, but their file formats are reasonably optimized for the kinds of things they handling. One could stick a unified "edit process starting/stopping" GUI on top of init, cron, xinetd, etc and you'd end up with some of that attractiveness.
It was actually a matter of putting the cd in, starting the installer, and choosing the "update" option.
I'd like to, but right now it's too hidden under lingo for me. Is there a good crash course?

Side note, is there a straightforward way to quantify the wealth of a nation? Using money seems to be such a shell game.
Coding at night is good. But I noticed another thing: texts written at night suck. In the morning you will inevitably be ashamed of what you wrote. The best time for blogging or writing emails is the beginning of the day. I wonder if it's the same for other people, and why this is.
James Cameron supercharges 3-D
The worst example I've ever seen:

http://www.gisinfo.ru/images/map2005_desk.gif

Count just the flashlight icons, there's 16 of them. And three Help icons next to each other. But the best part is the vertical sequence of icon mutations in the lower left center.
Oh that is so true. I avoid writing emails, blog posts, or anything public at night.

The upshot is code docs don't get written during a night-time hacking session.
You're right, and I should have given an example of what exactly I mean: the menus. Using Excel under Windows, I'm the master, knowing how to get to every menu item starting with Alt-(menu shortcut). I don't even have to look and it gets done. With other software, I'm not as good, but still better than average.

On Macs you can't drive menus like that. That's a serious productivity hit for me.

One question I would love to have an answer for: is this fixable using some kind of hack or installation of a program or something? That would be awesome.
Please, please kill this thread.
An significant factor might also be that when you are tired, you want to get the job done quickly and you spend less time thinking about the options and more time just going ahead.
"it is glaringly obvious you never spent any time either with a Mac"
Don't tell that to my boss - our company's IT system is all Mac :) Seriously, I've been a Mac user for 18 months, and now helping the company test Leopard for roll-out. I'm using a Macbook (the white variety) with a dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM. Yes it's still sluggish and I don't have any background software running.

As for modern Linux, I follow the release cycle of the majors. Every six months, I download and test Mandriva and Ubuntu, and sometimes others like Fedora, PC-BSD, and Mint (my pile of test CDs is getting silly). This week, I want to play with SymphonyOne 2008.1 (just released) because the interface is intriguing me. Invariably, on my laptop which is 2+ years old, something is broken.

None of them ever figure out my screen res (1280x800) natively. It's an ATI card, so my hopes are high now that AMD has opensourced the drivers.

Vista vs ME. Hmm, never thought of that but I think I agree with you!
Yes, yes, but the parent commenter is right in spirit. Soros is richer than god, so he's working to satisfy other ambitions now. From the economist article mentioned below:

The 77-year-old hedge-fund supremo and slayer of sterling has nothing to prove financially (he is worth upwards of $8 billion). Intellectually, however, he has long been frustrated at not being taken seriously. Just as he was about to give up, along came a debacle that, he believes, validates his Weltanschauung.

That fits pretty well with the carefully hidden acknowledgement that this isn't news:

And yet this is not the first time that Mr. Soros has prophesied doom. In 1998, he published a book predicting a global economic collapse that never came.

This article is about two things: the general hysteria of a generation of workers who have never seen a real recession; and a rich man in his final years trying to leverage his wealth into a legacy. They're both pandering.

Economist article here: http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...
Tell YC: The gap between idea and starting development - the longer the better.
I have been pondering away over an idea that I had a few months ago, I was writing a blog post about a problem when I had the aha moment, thus, I abandoned the blog post and started conceiving the new application. I spent a week knocking up some rough drafts to explore the technical problems and then got side tracked with another few projects that emerged and needed immediate attention. Since the conception a few months ago, there has been a wealth of other blog articles that have reinforced my initial belief that a desire exists for such an app, but more importantly I have been able to ponder what would be the best way to develop the concept. It's a complicated application so the time to reflect with ones mind open to the challenge while figuring out 'best possible solutions'. As a result I am starting back now on development but with more confidence in the concept and a better understanding of how to best execute the conception. Thus the moral of the story, have an idea, then sit on it for a few months to let the collective blogsphere to fuel the concept with elements that could well make all the difference between a killer app or dead donkey.
It's really easy to judge but without context it's rather pointless. If that is a consumer app then yes, it's far too complex. If however it's a specialist app to be used by a trained operator then that may well be the perfect, most optimal and efficient display of the information they (the trained operator) want.

Just thought I'd mention that although I agree with your general point speaking as an engineer that has created some crimes against HID and been saved by a designer.
I have recently had the same idea and tried to execute it with as an astonishingly great failure. I have a real estate site with high traffic, I sell adverts and have adsense too. I suspected I could see directly to these visitors with another spin off that I controlled. So I built an e commerce site selling organic wine (which I suspected would be of interest to the same clientel) and advertised it prominently on the real estate site. Hardly any traffic has resulted from the advert. The bottom line is, if the advert is not on topic with the mode de operation of the user at that specific time it will be ignored.
Night-time is best for my writing but worst for my coding - go figure. If I have a big backlog of emails, or I'm trying to write a journal paper, I don't even bother trying during the day anymore, unless there's a deadline.
I don't think it's for want of design ability - as rantfoil said a standard CS education just doesn't educate an engineer about how to design better. I think the lack of UCD emphasis is pretty strange really, it's not like even just considering the user requires graphic design skills or anything...
Not sure why he wants to be like Hegel and Keynes though.
It doesn't look too bad. Seems like some sort of bug tracking or issue tracking software. The middle section displays bugs. The top section lets you select what bugs to display. The bottom section displays information about the bug. The bit green "+" is used to add new bugs. It's not beautiful, but it gets the job done.

Edit: For comparison, look at these screenshots of FogBugz and Bugzilla

http://www.lazygray.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/prev...
http://www.mozilla.org/frontpage/productShotBugzilla.jpg

Software needs to be functional before it's beautiful. Ideally, you have both, but sometimes you need to prioritize.
They're both good systems. The OS environment you use has tweaks that you're likely to love or hate that will influence the decision, but it's not longer particularly relevant what OS you run on your desktop so long as you have a solid web browser and can virtualise windows to deal with Office stuff when you have to.
"This is what happens when you let someone who is lousy at designing interfaces, design interfaces."

Fixed that for you.
I think this is overly harsh. As far as I can tell, this is a program made by a single person in their spare time and was then open sourced. This is what happens when someone develops an application for themselves based around their own needs and then decided other people might want to use it - I'm sure the developer didn't set out to create a "great user experience".

Controversially, despite its ugliness and widget abuse, it does have some things going for it - it's largely self-explanatory and unambiguous and is probably incredibly quick to use due to its general lack of reliance on tabs and submenus.

A better example of a truly bad interface is Lotus Notes 7 - its UI was an utter disaster yet the application remained popular. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ln7.jpg - thankfully much, much improved with Lotus Notes 8 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Lotus_Notes_8_home.png)
I think Bugzilla is an example of a web application with an extremely badly designed user interface - I find it very frustrating to use in general with unclear navigation and excessive clutter.

Compare it to trac, an application that has basically the same functionality yet is a joy to use (e.g http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/6614)
Hamming ?

"Richard Hamming’s three questions for new hires at Bell Labs:
1- What are you working on?
2- What’s the most important open problem in your area?
3- Why aren’t they the same? "

http://www.chris-lott.org/misc/kaiser.html

Igor.
http://nuit-blanche.blogspot.com
Very often it is. But it's not as simple as that.

Try to turn things around - there are a lot of designers (and kids and grandpas) that code something up. This usually ends up as a horrible mess, not following any programming paradigms, spaghetti code, non-existing security, etc. We've all seen it happen. But you only see this if you're a professional programmer. Non-professionals don't see the detail, the design decisions, the security measures, the scalability, etc. They just see a slow or buggy site. Or worst-case they see their credit cards exposed.

Design is the same, just to a larger degree - everyone thinks they can do it, because well done design seems so simple. When they try to do their own, however, it is never quite as good and they don't understand why. The reason is the exact same as why novice programmers create crappy programs. To do a great and simple design you need a lot of experience and a lot of knowledge. Certain things need to align, some colors match others don't, certain design elements send certain signals to the user, etc. Have you ever noticed the drop-shadow on the logo on Google's homepage? Chances are you haven't, but it is a core part of their design - you don't notice it, but it holds up the whole page.

As a novice designer you can only get so far until you start running into problems that require expert knowledge and experience. Just like programming.

And when you start talking about usability (which I think the flaws in the linked pic are) things get even worse. Read Jakob Nielsens useit(http://www.useit.com) if you want to learn more about it.
This is how I do my ideageneration too.

I always have a thousand ideas in my head, and thinks about them in the shower, before I go to bed, etc. The good ones will tend to stay in my head and materialise more and more into a workable product and the bad (or just impossible) ones tend to fade away because I don't think about them anymore. The stuff I'm working on now has been an idea in my head for around a year, and I've thought about it every day. The result of this is that when I started coding I knew exactly what to make, and I haven't reimplemented or rethought anything because I know exactly what I want to make, down into almost every detail.
Yah this pretty much is what you want to say. I know many programmers, including myself strive to be great at UI design :)
Your first point is essentially meaningless. It makes no difference if it is a division, a child company, or part of the core business. Someone has to think about it, manage it and execute it. All this costs money which you could use elsewhere _and_ it creates potential conflicts of interests with your own business. This means that you need a really good reason to go ahead.

For an example of conflicts of interest look at the Windows/Office vertical integration and the constraints placed on Office in order to keep Windows profits high.

Your second point boils down to the fact that social networks give an awful return on investment. Could be true, but if so that's more of an argument to get out of social networks altogether and find a more profitable business.
I would say no - it's actually a pretty nice site.