skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fleurs,

It was intended to be a small point. The psychology and effectiveness of decision-making strategies could fill up books (and they have).

The scenario I had in mind is one where you have some limited set of options, a consensus is necessary, and the overhead of measuring the effectiveness of the alternatives isn't too high.

In those situations you're going to argue until someone gives in, someone higher up tells you to knock it off and makes a decision for you, or you decide to see which alternative actually does best.
Thanks, LPTS, for asking that. I'm in a similar possition. And thanks for the replies, especially aggieben.
A more useful piece of data would perhaps be the ratio of entrants to the software industry to the demand for them and a projection of this number to 5,10 and 15 years. For instance, the percentage of freshmen majoring in physics is abysmally low, but the selectivity of graduate programs says that is not enough demand for them.
Escape seems to revert to the text that was in the input field before anything was typed. How does that help?
Warren Buffett. He went from role model to hero when he donated his fortune to someone else's foundation. No one does that.

Steve Albini. I love his songs, but he's a hero for how he thinks and writes about music and the music industry. His "The Problem With Music," his review of Slint's "Spiderland," and his "Remembering a Friend" (about Silkworm's Michael Dahlquist) could be Paul Graham essays.

Judith Martin (Miss Manners). What PG wrote about Wodehouse and Austen applies to Martin, especially her early work, which is among the funniest, most sane, best written, and most useful writing I've ever encountered.

Bill James (the baseball writer). More than anyone else, he taught me how to think and how to share my thoughts with others.

S.R. Ranganathan. _The Five Laws of Library Science_ is fantastic. And his colon classification system is pretty great as well.
Using email addresses as OpenID identities (almost)
Safari also doesn't have firebug, the killer app for web developers
Ask YC: Choosing advisors for your Startup?
I'm interested in finding advisor's for my startup. 1.Is it necessary at the start. 2. Am I jumping the gun before I have a finished project. 3.When should or should I even bother finding people to help guide me. Thoughts please.
Great find. This is part of what I was getting at in this comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144616

Specifically, where I say that "Sometimes people manage to acquire the necessary values and thus the skills necessary to do well, despite starting off in adverse conditions. But they're the exceptions, and were psychologically and sociologically positioned to be that way." When some folks try to deny that there are any serious psychological and sociological barriers to success by pointing to those rare individuals who overcome socioeconomic adversity, they are ignoring the very phenomena these researchers are talking about. Some individuals are simply better positioned than their peers when it comes to dealing with the same conditions.

Thankfully, the research also has the effect of helping us to figure out how to overcome debilitating stereotypes, but one can hardly expect someone who grew up in the inner city to be reading SciAm.
There's not a formal line you cross where you say, "OK, now I need advisors". Talk to experienced people, get advice, and make the people that give you good advice your informal advisors. It's easier if you let it be a natural process, rather than a forced "advisor recruitment drive". It's never too early or too late for good advisors. A Board is a different matter entirely, and something that someone more qualified can comment on.
* $7B is nothing, go for the big fish*
if 10% of Hacker News readers morphed a $7B industry of a $ 7 B piece of any industry we would be talking about an impact in the trillions. how big is the fish you are pursuing?
A completely correct, but completely useless answer.
Mechanical Engineer Destroys Street Sweeping Industry with a single invention, the "trash-can"

Spencer is the inventor of the trash-can, a free receptacle for garbage that establishes locations on the street where pedestrians can dispose of their waste. With trash-cans located on street corners, a decent-size municipality can rip out its traditional collection of brooms, and even some of its newfangled street-sweeping machines, and say good-bye to 80% of its garbage collection costs. Not good news for the Professional Union of Street Sweepers (PUSS - news - people) or Broom Supplier, Inc. (BS - news - people).
Microsoft Sets Three Week Deadline for Yahoo! In Public Letter
Stereotypes probably do reinforce themselves somewhat. But this doesn't change my opinion that they are almost always true. Or at least, they are always grounded in fact. They may be exaggerated, outdated or oversimplified, but even so I think they are usually correct.
I almost included him. But I don't understand his work in physics, and it seemed lame to like him for peripheral stuff like his autobiography.
Happy 3rd BirthDay YC
I heard that YC Combinator celebrated its 3rd birthday last week.

Just wanted to pass along my congrats and thank the YC folks for the inspiration, hard work, and encouragement they provide to the startup community in general and all of us with a dream and desire to create something people want.
I read (parts of) A Pattern Language. That seemed like it had a lot of good ideas in it.
Yeah, where do you suppose I can find it?
Their Web Inspector is pretty good though http://webkit.org/blog/108/yet-another-one-more-thing-a-new-...
I for one would like that. I think we in the United States tend to be too single-spoken-language-minded. Regularly reading articles in a different language would be good for us.
Microsoft has a history of making bold announcements that don't bear fruit. So I no longer consider it news when Microsoft goes on stage and talks about what could be coming to market. They "could" be doing a lot of things, it doesn't mean they will succeed.

I am more impressed when Microsoft releases proof, like a demo. For example, Microsoft Research's video on their Surface technology was quite impressive, and showed just what the company has been up to.
Wow, now that's a goal in life: to have your kids look at you like that. Well, except for the 5:30 thing. That's just not gonna happen.
No love for Julio?
People who become total jerks because others show interest in them deserve no pity.

Regardless, the analogy is broken because one case is about what you are and the other is about what someone wants to take from you.
We can only hope. What I really like about solar-thermal power is the cost. It's actually cheaper to produce power plants, and the power generated is rapidly becoming cheaper than fossil fuel power. That, and you don't have the base load power problem that you have with photo-voltaic power.

I'm sure that there's problems with it. I just haven't come across any decent critiques of solar-thermal power plants yet.
Startups are freaking hard - simply because it is very easy to screw up lots of things and any one of those could be easily fatal.

You might already know that startups are hard, but in all liklihoods you won't know what 'hard' means.

Value an experienced startup entrepreneurs advice more than anything you learnt at school, and hunt one down as soon as possible.
Or less inflammatory: After a certain point, the cost of learning another language can outweigh the benefit.

I don't know many people who learn languages without the intent of ever spending time to do something with them.
Err, I assume they mean "loudly".
Try meneame.com - the spanish Digg?
Yes, people like DHH have mentioned using Firefox for development but Safari for casual surfing outside of work. I can't get comfortable with it for casual surfing, either, though.
Vendor disk failure rates: Myth or metric?
I like that version of it.
Is there a lot of tech information only available in Spanish? If so then of course. Although I, personally, will need good translations.

Or are you talking about the same news but in Spanish?
ISPs tracking online habits of at least 100,000 users via packet inspection.
I'd like to have more seasoned advisors.

Is this a situation where a market could exist? Some kind of matchmaking system for founders/mentors independent of the YC/YC-clone world?
Thanks for all the feedback. I think it is really high-quality, and now my to-do list is well stocked. I made some changes in the CSS area to address the various font issues. It is still a work in progress, but I think the advice on the sans-serif font is right on. If you get a chance, check it out and let me know.
You need your advisors a lot more than they need you.

That said, this is not a bad idea. StudentBusinesses.com is a site that's solving this problem for young entrepreneurs who need advice & resources.
That seems like an interesting tool and a novel approach. It is a little hard to wrap my head around how this does things that straight CSS cannot - are there some sites that use this that I can check out?
My advisor's are actually people that I already knew and are experienced entrepreneurs that I kept going back to for advice. I didn't seek them out and say "will you be my advisor?", it just naturally occurred. The advisor's I have are people that know and trust; they are also people that have 'been there and done that'. I have found my advisor's to be a great source of experience that I can tap into, and they are also great at keeping me focused and grounded - I tend to get too excited and carried away with my ideas.

It's always a good idea to find advisor's/mentor's that can help guide you along a successful path, and with whom you can bounce ideas off. I found the best way to find advisor's is to just find someone experienced in what you need advice in; if you keep going back to them for advice, then they naturally become your advisor's.

There are also different types of advisor's: business advisor's, technical advisor's, funding advisor's. Therefore, the type of advisor you need really depends on what stage you're at. Ideally, you would find one that has experience in a range of areas.

Have a read of: http://venturehacks.com/articles/advisors
Terry Fox and Wayne Gretzky. I'm guessing you are Canadian too. Both are definitely on my list of heroes too.
Great Presentation on MetaProgramming. Talks about pg/ycombinator/lisp/ruby. [video]
The speaker summarizes Paul Graham's theories on Lisp and startups with the following statement:

"Skilled programmers can write better programmers than they can hire"

I really enjoyed watching the whole video. Very interesting stuff. Highly recommended.
Ask HN: being accused of running sockpuppets, what would you do?
Being defensive about it seems to make things worse, being quite is not helping either, what would you do?

Edit: this is not specific to HN, but in general, wikipedia comes to mind where this problem is so acute.
Cool, thanks for taking the time. Please also convey my thanks to her if you get a reply.
Microsoft: Yahoo! has 3 weeks to decide
Would you ever trust a VC to be an advisor? (A VC not funding you.)

@All, thanks for the input so far. Given me a lot to think about and consider.
Just get investors. All good investors are advisors. And if an advisor isn't willing to invest, that's a worrying sign.
I would discuss it with PG via email, not in public.
Asterisk isn't all that special. I used it extensively a few years back with my last business. Its still a bitch to use and get going right, especially for businesses with crappy IT going for them.

It goes back to that PG quote, that went something like: "Somebody can outhack an oracle database and make something comparable in open source, but can't out sell an oracle sales man..." It was basically that these enterprize software companies (pbx certainly is enterprize software), are used to buying terrible stuff for too much money.
While the user who asked you which specific techniques you mean has a point, I'll go out on a limb and say that the more bureaucratic of this stuff is total hooey. It mostly exists to provide the illusion of control over software development (because how software development really works is either not understood or is incompatible with existing structures). A lot of it comes from ideas drawn from manufacturing or industrial processes that are profoundly inapplicable to what software teams do.

Look at it this way. When smart people do creative and productive work, they have fun. So if software development isn't fun, something's wrong.
The "tipping point" will arrive when the capital cost of solar power falls below $1 (51p) per watt, roughly the cost of carbon power. We are not there yet. The best options today vary from $3 to $4 per watt - down from $100 in the late 1970s.

Nanosolar is "the first solar manufacturer capable of profitably selling solar panels at as little as $.99/Watt" (http://www.nanosolar.com/blog3/2007/12/18/nanosolar-ships-fi...)

edit: after the post, I remembered that the cost of a solar panel is only about half the total cost of solar power.
Learning new languages can be mind-expanding, but taken to an excess, you might spending more time tinkering with languages than getting stuff done.
Trying to be a really good parent and provide enough for your family are perfectly admirable goals in life.

This is equally true for (eg.) the 2 billion people in India and China, many well-educated, many of whom are valiantly striving to match the Western standard of living (seen on Western teevee programs and in movies) by earning enough to provide it for their own families. Would you deny them their opportunity by foreclosing new markets?

Compete, adapt, or be swept aside in due course -- if you really care about your family, you will put a little thought into how best to support them as the world changes. Americans will experience a decline in average real income, but those who provide globally competitive value of interest to the rising middle class in other countries should do quite well.

I'm sure a great many stenographers, buggy-whip makers, and hand-launderers provided well for their families, in their day. But I submit to you that, overall, mankind is better off, even though change may have made their lives worse for a spell.

Someone else put it thus -- competition is a discovery process: discovering better ways to do things. If you do not participate, your value to society may decline as a result of that abstinence. It may not make you a bad person, but it will likely reduce your ability to comfortably support those you care about.

Do the right thing. ;-)
I think he means on his own site, not here.
Agreed. I say talk to anyone you can. You don't want to be pushy or anything, but most people love giving advice and being asked about their business or what they do.

I tend not to limit who I talk to to just entrepreneurial or software industry people either, I like to throw ideas at anyone I can. But the closer to the line of business, obviously the more they can speak on it.

I'm really lucky to have a dad who's also self-employed (that must be why I lean that way too), but regardless of the line of work they're in, it's interesting to hear different business owners talk about their experiences, and I think that helps to think about my business from different angles too.

Startups are just new businesses in a fairly new area, so experience in other areas of business are totally applicable. You can talk to anyone you know (friends' parents who own businesses, for example) about how they got started, how they got from idea to profitability, how they got through rough patches, etc.
Here is one way to approach the transition, starting today.

If you can leave Asterisk running somewhere and you already have say a domain name that you use for a blog or personal website, then you can point iax.domain.com to your Asterisk and start telling people to contact you at for example: user:pass@iax.domain.com/2000

To make it more readable just use your first name as the user, and your region or some other keyword as the password; its meant to be given out to the public anyway.

Client software to make and receive calls using this approach is called iaxComm. If you wanted your Asterisk installation to forward your calls to your cell phone at certain times of the day, or when your iaxComm wasn't signed in, then you'll have to subscribe for an outgoing voip service.

Eventually most people would be accessible through iax and you wouldn't have to subscribe to any service to reach the prior infrastructure.
some data is better than none, even if it's not fine-grained.

Not necessarily. If the features of your small data sample are unrepresentative or poorly analyzed, you run the risk of distorting your priors and making a poorer decision than that expected by chance alone.

We can chew the fat on this one for a very, very long time :-)
Product Development, Process Velocity, Team Dynamics and Challenges
I just expect that any "expert" whose intuition I'm supposed to trust will be able to justify their opinion when push comes to shove.

Don't expect them to justify it solely on your terms, however. If you're breaking into a new market or operating under asymmetric information pressure with significant uncertainty -- or even just regular old data starvation -- appealing to similar but difficult-to-quantify means of supporting one's intuition may be crucial.

It would be better for all concerned if the person making a claim could always articulate their reasoning in toto, but under the pressures of time, you may occasionally need to rely upon a person's track record, and trust them. Because their track record under similar conditions is a prior -- that, too, is data.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence -- but people with an extraordinary track record can sometimes be trusted to make extraordinary judgments with ordinary data.
Isn't that a little more complicated than finding an advisor? Investor-advisors would be preferable, but not all good advisors are investors (?)
NOBEL2: the next-generation optical broadband network
I remember seeing extensions for Firefox that do just that. Maybe you should investigate about it.

About the article itself, when I clicked I thought it would compare general stuff about firefox and safari, but it's mostly about mac OS integration. Since I don't use it the article ended up being pretty useless for me :(.
Looks interesting except for the student slant =) I think I just reinvented the Go Big Network. I'm going to see what that's all about.
Loopt featured on NBC nightly news
I heard Loopt was on tonight's news... anyone have a to the video?
Yes.

But it happened on HN too: I watch the logs all the time and cannot stop myself from jumping into discussion once a link to my site is posted somewhere, making it seem like I'm behind the original post. Probably should just stop doing it.
Is the part about it being "a bitch to use and get going right" based on your extensive use of it a few years back? Linux was a bitch to use and to get going right when I first started using it back in the 1990's.
I've nothing against it, but I speak no Spanish.

It would be neat if I could declare my linguistic ability in my HN preferences, so it only showed me articles that I can read.

I'd love to see HN full of Japanese links, for example, but I recognize that this would be of little value to most people.
A very large percentage of sites/products start off free and without ads but then start requiring subscriptions, reduce the value of their service and cram it with advertising once they get big. In these numerous cases, "future price" would not equal lower. Certainly, technology drives prices down but technology is not the only factor that affects pricing. Unless you mean very long term? But in very long term, everything is just going to go to zero so that frame of reference is not very useful.

I agree that this elimination of competition is bad for the consumers, bad for innovation, and bad for those more capable companies that didn't get the huge funding. It's just making the rich richer.
Ability to read all the comments you've made - i.e. More link on user comments page.
"recently closed tabs, auto-restoring the tabs from my last session"

Safari 3 has those features as well. Really the only thing Safari lacks is a good extension system.

WebKit is a top-notch browser engine. Even after all these supposedly amazing improvements in the Mozilla engine WebKit is still faster.
Stereotype threat is such an interesting concept. It's closely connected to the idea of malleability of intelligence as explained in e.g. this article:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-sm...

It raises interesting issues of what people actually mean when they want someone who "is smart and gets things done". Just the basic expression "smart people" seems to imply that you have rejected the idea of malleability of intelligence and think that people are either smart or not. I'm not really arguing that there is not an innate random quality to "aptitude", but if you believe that article you don't want someone who is smart, you want someone who has worked hard to acquire important skills, since people who just think of themselves as "smart" are more likely to cave when faced with difficulty.
It's less complicated in some ways. It's easier to tell if they have invested in you than if they are giving good advice.
Who wants to bet, that when solar power becomes as cheap or cheaper than fossil, oil prices will magically plummet with some half-assed explanation as to why. Sort of like the reasons prices are increasing now, just in reverse (except no one will care)
Loopt on NBC Nightly News [video]
From the cursory look, BadCyclopedia doesn't cite anything. Looks like a spam site.
If by "stereotypes are usually correct" you mean that if there is a stereotype that says "people of group G have property P" then people in group G are statistically more likely than average to have property P than the general population, then you may very well be right that stereotypes are correct more often than they're incorrect, but it kinda misses the point of why stereotyping is a bad idea.
By 'in the next year' he means that feature creep will postpone it for another three to four years.
If you're going to call him out on the probability that any given person can create a startup more successful than a day job then at least be more specific as to what you think that probability is.

Him: It's impossible. You: It's so certain, it's basically guaranteed!

You can be a person who behaves very aggressively with what appears to be extremely risky behavior but at the same time calculate risk very carefully with as much data as possible. This is what I aim to be, a calculated risk taker. Not a foolish man who dives head first without thinking.

Motivation is really great, but I don't see a lot of value in blind optimism.
The 8 Essential Tools for Programmers
What tools to you consider essential and fundamental for programmers?
Coming soon: superfast Internet
Umm ... if they're a VC and they're your advisor, why are they not funding you? One possible explanation is that they don't believe in you, and unfortunately this is what most outsiders will automatically assume.

It's not really a question of trust.
That should be standard operating procedure in any language - makes it much easier to track down bugs and much harder to get into a state where you have to throw away lots of code because you broke everything.

I usually write a few lines, refresh & test manually, write a JSUnit test case to cover what I just checked out, run tests & hope for a green bar, check-in, then repeat.
Merlin Mann shows off some Steampunk DIY
Joe Simpson - demonstrated to me that individuals are capable of quite extraordinary feats.
Yes, oil prices will decline, but there's a real, sensible reason! (not "some half-assed explanation" like you say)

It's basic economics. Cheap solar power (a substitute for oil) will reduce demand for oil ... so the market price of oil will decline if the supply of oil is the same. But oil isn't traded on a free market, so it's a bit more complicated.