skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. Maturity. The ability to not whine about every little problem one runs into, but Google it down quickly and fix it right away. This is about persistence. I find it difficult to work with people I have to motivate at every step of the way through a project.

2. Holding a program in one's head. I'm not sure really whether to attribute this to PG or Peter Norvig, or somebody else. The best way to understand this is really to experience it in practice. Everyone finds it difficult to keep a mental image of a project once it starts to grow, but it seems like some programmers have an especially hard time with this.
I'm sorry you found it confusing (hence the redesign in progress ;) ). The hearts are white until you favourite a song. I can see how this can be confusing when they are red in the instruction text.
Most notable: 70 people showed up for a Lisp user group.
From the comments: have you also considered that its 1st of April today and that this might be a joke?

Its slightly harder to distinguish Apple related April Fools, partly because Apple was incorporated on Thu 1 Apr 1976.
Working in Cinema 4D on a WWII dogfight through a fjord in Norway circa May 1945.
I got a macbook last year. The massive student discount contributed most to my decision. But, it does look really cool in my hemp messenger bag.

Running Ubuntu on it is a nightmare, so I am beginning to regret my decision. Now, I just do all of my work over ssh on my server or my labs' boxes.

And a pro definitely is not nearly worth it (and doesn't look nearly as cool).
I know you can jailbreak it, but you can ultimately hack anything to do anything (ie, people putting linux on every damn piece of electronics out there).

And yes, it matters a lot which company you support, since not only do a significant number of insignificant funds add up, but you're giving them mindshare and encouraging others to follow (which is kinda the point of pg's mac essay).

Just to give you an idea of why I'm so mad at Apple, the project that I'm working on right now needs a very good mobile component. Android is completely open and lets you do everything you need, so the first version is based on that. However, there can't be an iPhone app because Jobs is a control freak, he has decreed that I should not have the ability to write what I want to write.

So no, I just don't understand why people that supposedly value openness have such adulation for one of the most restrictive platforms out there. The eye-candy isn't worth it.
I'm working on http://16characters.com/
Ask YC: Where does vc money go?
I'm looking at starting to develop a web-based service in my off time. One thing I'm wondering is: where exactly does the money VC's provide go? The reason I ask is I'm planning on developing in my off time (usually only sleep 4-5 hours a night anyway so even with a dayjob I'll have a decent amount of time at least to start out.) so I won't need to support myself with investment money or anything. So what DO I need money for? Where do all those millions actually go? I'm having a hard time conceiving a situation where I would need to spend anything of that order. Advertising? Hiring additional coders? Hosting? If I'm just a 3-person outfit working in our free time where am I going to start incurring these huge hard costs?
Depending on the industry many companies can give a lot of info away if you just call them and discuss private labeling or buying technology from them.
a facebook app - as a beta test / proof of concept for rephoria.com
.......not dying
When you say mod_rewrite, you refer to mod_rewrite or to regular expressions?
Isn't that where the Club Penguin guys were from? They might know a thing or two. Or maybe want to use some of that $700M.
our next computer will be a Mac as well, when our old Dell desktop finally dies. When you can run OSX and Windows on one machine, why ever buy a PC again unless you're a hard-core gamer?
A Gentle Introduction to Category Theory looks pretty good: http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~fokkinga/mmf92b.html
A large but unknowable proportion of businesses fail pursuing nearly perfect strategies
The Ajaxian March roundup
I'd venture a guess that 15-20% of the entire population's next computer will be a mac. I know I'm making the switch.
Future Apple commercial: A hot girl sitting in the grass in a park with a laptop, and guys going over and wanting to touch the laptop and ignoring the girl.
Just looking at these comments, Paul should follow up with an article on how to be succinct. People can be such drags when they are trying hard to sound intelligent.
The Etymology of "Hacker"
http://olpcnews.com/content/localization/learning_language.h...
I'm working on a web based group insurance (employee benefits) platform for the Canadian market. Right now, this market is dominated by enterprise software. Further barriers to entry basically revolve around needing to be established to be trusted.

I have the connections, and have recognized that massive inefficiencies can be capitalized on by an upstart with the right knowledge.

Wish me luck.
Ha! good one!

cadalac FTW!
Orders of thought - beyond IQ
Some ideas on ways of thinking beyond IQ and other formalized measures. IQ, though valid, seems to dispense much less information than it should, and some suggestions to change that.
Xobni announces support for Pine
Superiority and ease of use aside.

People's taste always change once in a while. We've been living in the world of Windows for 10-15 years. People got bored with Windows and Dell.

Mac gives them a new "toy" (not literally, but gadget wise).
Finally! I was unable to use Xobni in its multi-color blur of confusion. Green, black, text, and search. All I need. Beautiful.
My longest day-to-day combo is "vabx" or "vaby". Basically, for lisp code, it selects the entire s-expression including the parens, and either removes it or deletes it.
To run Linux, of course!
Glad to see pine support, but I think elm support would make more sense
fixing IE issues...isn't that what most people spend their time on?
I wasn't being facetious, that's really what happened with Ariba.

I know -- those guys were friends of mine in the Mission. I wasn't being facetious either; I was there too...
Factors limiting the performance of large organizations, or, bestiary of human foibles
Dead horse? No such thing.

Only insufficiently flogged ones.
Growing a Language by Guy Steele
Nobody's Fool: Erik Naggum Quotes
Joyent's Players' Club
Has anyone gotten any info back on this?
Good question! I mean that in the sense that I also have wondered about what I should do.

From what I've read and researched (based on the answers here), Clickpass is the best way to go.

It's also got PG's support, so it can't be all bad. :-)
Ask YC: Stealing an idea
A former coworker had a great idea and had played around with it (just enought to get an idea of what it could do and some logos -- although I didn't like the name or logos). Since our initial conversation about it (I saw him doodling something one day), I've thought about it a lot and have a lot of ways to expand it/implement it already in my head).

The idea is great, not a huge moneymaker, but enough to get some residual income from it.

The only thing that is special to him is he knows someone that would help with supplying some items for the thing.

So, YC HN, do I steal the idea? I've talked to him about partnering, but he says he doesn't have time to work on it. I'd like to force his hand a bit and get an introduction to the contact and then hit the ground running... Maybe kick back some small % to him?

He's a great designer though and I'd love his help with that aspect...
I do visual effects and animation. Currently wrapping up a Pringles commercial. Can't show the spot but my other work is here: http://chriskelley.tv/work/
Erik on disagreement:

"Some people are little more than herd animals, flocking together whenever the world becomes uncomfortable for any reason, seeking the comfort of those who agree with them, do not contradict them, and take care of their emotions. I am not one of those people. If I had a motto, it would probably be Herd thither, me hither."

Erik on programming languages:

"Languages shape the way we think, or don't."

Erik on programming dogma:

"Gotos aren't damnable to begin with. If you aren't smart enough to distinguish what's bad about some gotos from all gotos, goto hell."

And Erik on the elections:

"Suppose we blasted all politicians into space. Would the SETI project find even one of them?"
I agree with ericb that many apparently difficult concepts are made harder to understand by an abundance of poor explanations. But in the same way, some of them are made harder to understand by poor design. Continuations might be an inconvenient factorization of their underlying concepts.

Monads seem more fundamental to me, in that they capture a broader class of ideas, and seem less machine-oriented. But the overwhelming number of awful monad tutorial blog posts suggests that they aren't any more convenient to think about than continuations.

I think maybe we're lacking a good framework for thinking about concurrency in general. Threads seem simple at first, but make it easy for even very skilled hackers to get tangled up in race conditions and deadlocks. Coroutines are perhaps easier to grasp than continuations, and easier to reason about than threads, but seem less fundamental.
That must explain how people have already written posts complaining that it's elitist and consists of nothing more than my subjective opinions presented as if they were true.
thats funny, but seriously Thunderbird and Mail.app support would rock my freaking world.

For now I'll keep referring to Xobni as Kooltuo. That's not bitterness speaking, it's jealousy...
Site request: make the post textarea bigger
Please :)

3 rows when posting makes it difficult to proofread when I'm trying to post something insightful

The 30ish when editing would be nice :)
But does anyone else find themselves really, really, wishing the Google/Virgin Mars mission announcement was true?
Checking stats after a new release of http://www.tudumo.com
It's a to-do list. Seriously, because there weren't enough. Unique, like the others :)
Fortress is released
Ask YC: How will you solve the problem of climate change?
Don't ask me
This is one of the better jokes because it actually has something to do with the company. I mean, colonizing Mars? C'mon.

I can't wait for Xobni for Gmail.
People always like talking about what they're working on.
:x is the same as :wq, so for those who don't like q's, you can save your pinky.
Let's be really serious together.
Just do whatever makes sense economically and socially. I don't think you should have any moral hangups about stealing the idea (ideas are worthless, and they aren't property so you can't steal them), but you also don't want to piss off an acquaintance unnecessarily.
I'm not sure this is a good thing.

As far as I can see, Apple is if anything even more tyrannical and monopolistic than Microsoft, the main difference being that Apple is sexier. Apple wants the computer to become like a household appliance, closed to outside modification.

Looking at how they've run iTunes, the restrictive iPhone SDK, etc ... M$ wanted to control all your software but they at least gave you some choice on hardware. If Apple becomes the new monopoly we won't even have any say on that.
Any chance you are located in Montreal (or willing to move?)
Montreal seems to be hopping right now with startup energy. There is ample seed and early stage capital with a number of high profile new funds having recently launched. I am in the process of raising capital for a startup venture based in Montreal and the response so far has been encouraging.
He meant that people put easter eggs into applications because they hated the corporate drone work and used the eggs as a form of rebellion. Web 2.0 was suppose to free us all from that sort of drudgery.
I'd pay to see your essays in a revision controlled format.

Even better would a screencast of your editor.
it was 200 dollars in quarters
They are talking about DNS hosting for domains..
Hence the success of Twitter
Google searchers could end up with a new type of bug
Category theory is important to type theory and semantics (Pierce, see below, also wrote several books on types in programming languages) and offers a different representation of computational flow (monads, arrows).

Benjamin Pierce's "Basic Category Theory for Computer Scientists" (not online) is terse and complete [1].

Wikipedia is good for definitions and there's also a Wikibook on category theory: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Category_theory

There are some brief, informative, and fun lectures on YouTube by the Catsters: http://www.youtube.com/profile_play_list?user=TheCatsters

The natural transformations playlist is where to start, just be ready to use the aforementioned references.

__

[1] Natural transformations are the original point of category theory. A text that doesn't cover them is incomplete.
I'm wondering if you're a "Gen Y'er" (or whatever they're calling that newfangled generation these days ;)

Apparently the defining starting birth year for that generation is 1982. I happen to have been born that year, and my preferred term for the generation is "Millennials". "Gen Y" over-emphasizes our interaction with the "slacker generation" which preceded us.

Anyway, I don't think that there's much correlation between birth year and vi. With the rise to prominence of Linux and other Unix systems many many budding hackers are starting out with full-fledged command lines and honest-to-goodness Unix. And that's a beautiful thing.
Ice cubes. Lots of them.
Don't worry, I'll fix it. This happened once before and we were able to repair the damage from backups.
So cool to read all that stuff. Guys, you are all busy so far...me too!
wouldn't the "A is to Z as Y is to X" sorts of questions on the IQ test be quantifying the very sorts of things he's talking about here?
It's not a startup, but it's something I've been thinking about doing for a while. It's a collection of articles on the topic, "Things I wish I had known before my 1st startup" You can check it out at bizglue.wordpress.com. A lot of the articles came from YC, but several came from other, random sources. It's not really a blog - more of a personal business catalog to help me in my next startup.
i watched this lecture yesterday. it was on proggit yesterday! ;)
That is a bit worrying, but at least it will be a monopoly they've earned one user at a time, like Google, rather than an existing monopoly they took over from the previous owner, like Microsoft.

That will tend to limit their misdeeds, because to do that a company has to have a different type of employee. If Google wanted to start being evil, they'd face an internal revolt. And Apple too, to some extent.
Raganwald in disagreement
OOXML looks to have cleared ISO.
I thought only cars got you laid. And I believed even that so little that I bought an SUV.
Actually, I would say that the math behind the algorithms is not the hard part (someone else already did the hard work, as you mention); the hard part about crypto is learning all of the subtle ways that you can screw something up. This is the reason you should never implement your own crypto code -- by definition it will suck for a long, long time.
Is this interesting? I tried to find out on the fortress project page linked above, but all I could quickly glean was that it requires Java, and it's intended specifically for HPC, with support for some concurrency primitives.

Same song, nth verse, waste of time and no better than the first?
Hillary and Obama Drop Race
for the NPC ai, I recommend having the online part of the algorithm not use GAs, but just some sort of statistically learning on decision trees, GAs done right are tricky, and its worth pointing out that they're basically an optimization technique best used when the problem domain doesn't have enough structure to use other techniques which provide much stronger guarantees.
One of the better April Fools joke.
I have to say though, that having an MMO which has an open content creation system and is well architectured would be fun
OOXML which was submitted by Microsoft to ECMA, and by ECMA to ISO, has literally crawled through the needles eye.

NO! A document format is an abstract thing that can't "literally" crawl through a needles eye. Maybe a tiny little bug might be able to literally crawl through the eye of a needle, but not a freakin document format spec. Arrgggg. </rant>
I am using Mobile Python to replace an existing Symbian C++ app of 100,000 lines with an app of 20,000 python lines - for a client. Wish me luck.
Legend of Zelda Trailer (awesome april fools)
I felt like I gave that aspect of his post the reply it deserved. I'm not accusing him of not having spent a moment on it, but of missing things a moment's thought should have shown him. It's actually charitable to attribute that to an oversight.

And you're right, he does state something close to the central point of my essay. But if you keep reading, that's not the part he tries to refute.

Your last paragraph is actually the most thoughtful response I've read about this whole controversy. But I think you're wrong to say that startups glorify the individual. The startup founders I know are on average more idealistic than people working for big companies. They tend to be the ones who want to make the world a better place; though there are of course exceptions, the people working at big companies are the ones who tend to think of their job as something they do mainly for the money.
I loved it. Stick with it for the first... 15 minutes or so, and you'll realize how clever his talk is.
What's GDay?
Sounds like a good idea, but r u sure ur reaching ur target demographic with that name? :)
I have friends in all of them, and Chappel Hill is a good school, and with lots of girls, a lot of cuties too. But the trend is that they get fat after school. As an area, Raleigh-Durham is ok.

I have to say thou, even if a person is smart, if the enviroment around them is boring, then it will affect them on the long run. Raleigh-Durham has a lot of college educated people, but still, overral the whole area is a giant parking lot. You have to drive anywhere to do anything ( which makes people fat), plus people live isolated lifes. Compare with somebody living in walkable cities with decent public transportation such as NYC, SF, Boston, Chicago or D.C. where you have to interact with people all the time.
Well, make sure all your code, docs and media are portable. So, remind me, what exactly is the problem?
I'm Getting Pretty Tired of Startup Advice that Doesn't Include Any Mention of SEO
In case anybody cares, the article for which this was research is live:

Making Your IT Department More Attractive to Women
Want more women on your staff? You need to do more than offer family-friendly employee benefits. Women at every level of the career ladder describe the corporate behavior that can attract them to a company—or chase them away.
http://www.cio.com/article/325513
Wow! The odds? read my comment...
At least they contribute to open source, are more UNIX-like and seem more open in general, speaking of Internet standards.
Seems like a serious concern would be protecting the kids in this virtual world, lord knows the other "Kid" playing the game may be a 30-year old creep in his mom's basement. (Of course I worry about this when I play WoW as an adult, lol!)

I'm sure you've thought about this in depth, but my first thought was, that if you could make it a game that a child could play WITH a parent, and both coud enjoy, then that would be something I would buy for my family!

Consider movies... everyone knows the highest grossing movies are the kids movies that ALSO appeal to parents, (Shrek, Bee Movie, Shrek II, Everything Pixar, anything with the word Shrek it in...)
OS's have some network externalities, so "one user at a time" isn't entirely accurate. There's a tipping point in there some where.

Have you read "In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 years of High Tech Marketing Disasters" ? He makes a convincing case that a lot of the MS monopoly comes not from brilliant products or evil genius, but by hitching a ride on a more open platform, and having had less disasters than the competition.

I'm not sure I agree with him 100%, because once they got that toehold, they sure exploited it to crush everyone else. I don't have many doubts that Jobs has some crushing tendencies himself - exhibit #1 is the look and feel lawsuit.
Paint all roads white.
and mutt?
Number crunching with Google Earth to find the best places to be in in the future.
far as I know, they have no plans for Thunderbird support.
Why I like vi/vim.

Its always there. Even on tiny linux distros.

It allows me to operate just as fast on extremely high latency connections. It was the only usable editor when I was stuck with 650ms+ latencies on VSAT.
As a resident of one of our lovely northern states recently digging out of a cold winter into a colder spring, my only concern is that by the time it gets notably warmer , I'll be long dead.
And we're getting tired of linkbaiting posts.
A very nice site with VC & Startups news
Just launched today and looks great. It has many tech news categories among them VC&Startups news. Users can also submit their own stoires.
Oldie, but goodie from Steve Pavlina. He argues that hard work is a competitive advantage. It's an unpopular notion that seems to work well for those that try to stick to it.
Utterz Mobile Site is Live- Better Mobile Access to Social Networks
maybe linkbait...

but it has a lot of good examples, seo is really something overlooked here, and it is relevant to this site obviously
I actually found this quite interesting. Although most people would love to grow virally through word of mouth, top search rankings bring in enormous amounts of traffic day after day. I know of blogs that haven't updated in years that still get hundreds of visits per day solely from Google.
Cooking dinner.
It is a strange language, but I've been wanting to study it for a long time. Thanks.
holy sh*t!!! nickb = pg ????
That is a great way to get info but that is also where you start walking the line of legality.
As the old saying goes, if it ain't broke don't fix it :)
why is everyone so smitten with Macs? the average college student does not need one and would be better served by buying an iPhone and a $400 dell
yes that is true..that was one of the reason we tried to gather news on VC&Startups and SEO/SEM in our site at naubo.com under the blogs section. The ideas was to make it useful and raise the issue as they go hand and hand...
4.2.2.2
Help make the most enjoyable kind of life less dependent on stuff, space and transport by returning centeredness to urban existence.