skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I sold my laptop on eBay about a year and a half ago. The winning bidder had a 100+ feedback rating, so I thought everything was fine, but then I get the email that he wants me to ship it to Nigeria. I contacted eBay via their chat support, and they were actually not that lame -- they agreed that obviously one of these scumbags had pwned a legitimate account, and refunded my money. When I relisted it, it sold without incident.
If You Guys Are Right, Facebook Is Screwed: Facebook Poll Results
Castle or Home? What same $ amount gets you in US vs abroad.
The Future of PHP
Best Programming Jokes
Did you give them prior warning? What was your negotiation like (cordial or walkout?) Or did it just come out of the blue? I came back from a trip from Guatemala and was spouting off about quitting and going there the week I came back so the element of surprise is not there (and not in my non-secretive personality).
Configuring Folding@home for Linux
I actually did know COBOL once upon a time. There was an organization called "Business Professionals of America" that did a programming contest for kids in High School. I can proudly say that in 1996 I was the 2nd best COBOL programmer under 18 in Texas. ;-)

This is actually a very good book on COBOL, and the one that I used to learn at the time:

http://www.amazon.com/COBOL-80s-J-Wayne-Spence/dp/0314632905

The hardest thing is getting your head around COBOL's basic structure as it comes from a branch of the programming languages tree that died out long ago. Good luck. :-)
Do it once as a pauper and then as a prince.
You are my hero. I'd like to go to Latin America for 3 months to study Spanish but I'm starting to settle for getting tutored in Spanish. Reading your account (7 months!) and great why-not-do-it articles like this makes me start thinking, however, that upper management might negotiate something nice if I do really walk away...
We have tulips too (Seattle).
I'm sure the dog enjoyed his bone.
Google App Engine.
I was about to refer you to AppJet, but apparently they're switching back from PHP to Javascript.
This is why we do startups, right guys?
Don't.

Sorry... Though your questions are different, I decided to tell you this anyway. I've done similar work in the past and I certainly don't recommend it. Please ask around (not the questions you are asking now) before going ahead with this.
Congrats Adam and Heroku! Now move back to Burbank. ;)
I am just getting into it and am trying a few things with it on the google app engine.

I am also trying to collect real-world apps and code to see how others are build and hence learn by thier example.
$280 billion on outsourced call-centre services

This is greater than the GDP of Washington State. I call bullshit.

http://www.bea.gov/bea/newsrel/gspnewsrelease.htm
Though it's not going to be personally fulfilling in the same way as modern hacking, there's pretty good money to be made consulting on legacy systems.
Craigslist should be thanking eBay, because all the scams and fraud on it have made all the people weary of shipping things, So local classifieds thrive.
With the job market the way it is and not having the best GPA in the world, I don't really have any other options right now. Also, I already signed a 6 month contract. So, as much as I would like to do some python coding for Google, I am kind of backed into a corner at the moment.
I guess if you can't bring pythonistas to lisp, you can go out and meet them. Certainly, this is a great example how to prove to the uninformed that lisp is relevant in the modern world.

Who cares about the uninformed? They don't write libraries or participate in the community, so their existence is irrelevant.
I'll quote you: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=178094

:-)
I think you meant not the kind of experience one should regret. People are capable of regretting just about anything.
RealNetworks Spinning Off Games Business (RNWK)
fwiw, gibson's neuromancer comes to mind here
lol, yeah, this is the friend. To each his own.
A startup that makes me wish I knew how to code.
*I have no affiliation with this company other than being a fan of one of their FB apps (Friends for Sale) and thinking their About page was funny.
All the best in your ventures. I just wanted to make sure it is a conscious choice.
they failed faster, and they failed cheaper. it was doomed anyways.
If this comes in a retail box and has a normal license on the box it could be ebay'd for a lot more than $59.99.
I've done this too. I had tickets for a 6 week trip to India. The week (!!) before leaving, I was pulled into the CEOs office and asked not to go.

I remember being really pissed.

And then the VP of Engineering came to the rescue and said "I don't think you understand. He's going. The only thing you're doing is helping him decide to come back."
One thing to keep in mind about raising funding: It's often harder to raise funding than actually building a product/company, and much less fun.
I think this is a merger of two facebook app companies that had some pretty active news.yc members. They got a Series A from Lightspeed pretty recently.
will try for the next one.
Yeah, this is the way to do it. Instead of quitting your job and traveling, travel while you have a job. Someone I work with routinely travels around the world and lives with friends for a few weeks. As long as there's the Internet, you can get plenty of work done, and have plenty of time to enjoy the world. Why sit at home and chat on IRC when you can just go live with other programmers for a while. (We work on a lot of open source stuff, so it's always good to hang out with the other contributers. If you don't have a lot of hacker friends, this approach might not work.)

Anyway, I liked what I saw :) so I'm going to Tokyo tomorrow for this purpose. It counts as work, and will be quite fun.
I have an invite. Tweet me.
It's odd that both of the articles here today about IKEA started with a jab about how difficult it is to assemble IKEA furniture. The reason I buy stuff there is because putting it together is so fun. It's like legos, except you get nice furniture instead of an oddly-colored house :)
That is so true.
I agree with you, pg.

But how do you filter out what those users exactly want from noise? For example, a lot of users making noise to Apple saying they want FM radio, wireless feature. Apple did not put the wireless until iPod Touch and iPhone. And still no FM.

The filtering is based on data? or vision?
The problem with this kind of approach is that you reward people whose opinions are closest to the average. Those are not the smart people.
Look at what they do instead of what they say.
Thanks, this is the greatest enlightenment.
It just could not get any more web2.0 than that comment ;)
Here´s an idea.
Comments with downvotes are like spam.
Comments with upvotes are like good email.
Train spam filter with comments.
Use auto karma for comments with few votes, maybe they were just late to the conversation.
Comments with little votes get boosted or downgraded based on spammyness.
Argh, would love to try this out, but it apparently it doesn't compile on SBCL or CMUCL yet. Still, definitely won't get properly useful until more or less the whole standard library is supported.

This will be really cool if it carries on a gets to completion.
Thanks, sorry.
But right click on the image and "save the image" beats the robots.txt, too. The in the previous example, this girl just don't want any pictures to be saved by anyone.
yeah i accidently click on the down button all the time on my windows phone too; just did it today again...
Just got my first down-vote bombing. It'd be nice if there was some sort of detection so that one person could only down-vote another person a couple times within a short period. I had somebody that down-voted everything that I'd posted (in separate threads) that still had down-arrows.
What?! They went over my helmet?
this isn't a tutorial, but this should help: http://www.eclipse.org/cobol/
Processing ported to JavaScript
By all means, have a sex life - it won't impact your chances
While the WSJ and certain VCs may disagree - it's not impossible to have a life outside of your startup.

I own a home, have a few side startups, work as a consultant fulltime for a consulting firm, am an active freemason, play in a regular poker game and take a month off of work every year - all while maintaining my relationship (and getting married in July).
That's fine and I even like using .net, but at any point MS can pull a VB6 "not supported" on any technology or part of your stack while it has known vulnerabilities and you can't do anything but chew on it. How can you even put a cost on that?
Translating ASCII math notation to MathML and graphics
OpenBSD dev fixes 25 year old directory handling bug
I'd recommend this talk at Google to anyone interested in sparking some ideas in the game-productivity field:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143

It starts out slow, but it's from a guy who worked on Google's image labeling site:

http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/
psql's EXPLAIN basically shows you the execution plan, IIRC. MySQL's EXPLAIN provides the information about what keys will be hit for which joins in a more compact fashion.
Great, so I worked on good posture during the last year for nothing.
You're right, that's probably it. Sadness.
Can anyone recommend chairs that lean back this far?
Using TubeMogul to Increase Traffic and SEO
Affordable Gold & CZ Rings, Costume Jewelry & Bangles
Other problems: the game is complicated and it is not obvious that this would be fun to play.
To paraphrase the infamous /. meme...

1. Ridicule and stereotype nerds.
2. ????
3. Profit!!
Why change the title of the original post from "Why I Like Silicon Valley" to the less accurate and misleading "Why You Must Be In Silicon Valley"?
Microsoft Tells Its Alternate Yahoo Board Members It Won’t Be Needing Them
I think the most entertaining thing about this article is that they quoted Dr. Bashir. I wonder how often people make jokes about that to him.
Interesting. Could Outlook & Word be #1 & #2 due to the fact that people open it at the start of the day and close it at the end of the day? So, they might not use it all day but since it's open all day, it shows up as #1 & #2?

Any comments from the Rescue Time folks?
Ask YC: "Getting Started" guide in app. What do you guys prefer?
Hey guys, another Mac app question. I'm going over some of the "Getting Started" stuff in our app right now and am just wondering what all of you think about an initial guide to help jumpstart the use of an app. I come from the web world (im an xhtml/css hacker, designer) so I don't know too much about typical/best practices in terms of app development.

Its my personal belief that we've accomplished our mission of a user can come right into our app and quickly, without the need of a guide, understand where to go and what to do. What do you guys think? We're doing something pretty edgy (never done before, new concept, etc...) so it might be necessary in this case.

Ideas? Thoughts? Any hidden resources out there for good practices RE: mac apps would be great!
not yet: http://venturebeat.com/2008/05/08/shawn-fanning-negotiating-...
Sprint, Clearwire again try to boost broadband - high-speed mobile Internet service
Wow, I'd love to use this to generate dynamic graphs with text - but does it support text?
InputEx: a Javascript framework for web forms
Just follow this guy's advice:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=184930

and code from a beach chair in Brazil. ;-)
Canvas itself does not support text; there are various hacks to, e.g., port PS fonts to canvas, but it's a really ugly scene. Other methods include overlaying HTML text via CSS and server-side image rendering fonts. It's all really ugly.
Magnatune launches DRM-free subscription service
Ask YC: The art of invitation design?
I am very interested in learning more about the art of invitations. I am talking of users inviting other users to try out a web service. I am particularly impressed with linkedin. The invitations from linkedin work quite effectively. Invitations from other social networking services are mostly ignored. Is it something about the subject line that can make it or break it.

Any thoughts on it?
I think Rescue Time only counts something when an app has focus.
Caught a typo on the front page, 2nd paragraph, last line: "...and intrests well organized."

Nice concept, though. Will check it out now.
I have been to Spain twice (to study Spanish both times), and I can say for certain that learning it here is not even remotely the same as being immersed in it. If you are serious about learning it and learning about the culture, I'd heavily recommend you go live there for a while.

There are tons of great intensive Spanish programs both in Spain and Latin America that are cheap (mine was $3000 for four months, including an apartment and 20 hours of class a week). I have maybe eight months total of language education and I already speak better than people I know in their senior year of a Spanish major.
Even more so, I think it only counts if there is activity in the window (ie kb/mouse)
You could end up biasing your community towards the mundane (the digg/fark model) if you aren't careful, but what I'm thinking about is something that instead of rewarding people who are "good voters" (for lack of a better term) instead seeks to reward those community members who consistently support high quality contributions.

I define "karma" as a means of valuing your contributions to the community, and it seems that this ought not be dominated simply by what you contribute in a literal sense, but also in what you contribute by encouraging others by voting up their valuable contributions. If our definitions differ, I can see that being the cause of the disagreement.
People use outlook all day. It's the number 1 work email client by far. Same goes for word, given a job type.
Skype Accepts Lower Court Judgement (Skype vs GPL software author)
I've got to say RescueTime is one of the better new apps out there in terms of filling a need for me, and working well.

I love using it to make sure I get in the amount of time I want to on my projects, it's simple and intuitive to use.

I just wish they'd drop that wacko support site... :-)

EDIT: of course now that I say that, I can't bring up the dashboard. :(
I knew it! I feel entirely justified about my 'poor' seating posture now!
A-M-A-Z-I-N-G
My favorite 2:

How many programers dose it take to change a light bulb?

None - It's a hardare problem

---------------------

A programmer finds himself in front of a committee that decides whether he should go to Heaven or Hell. The committee tells the programmer he has a say in the matter and asks him if he wants to see either Heaven or Hell before stating his preference.

"Sure," the programmer replies. "I have a pretty good idea what Heaven is like, so let's see Hell." So an angel takes the programmer to a sunny beach, full of beautiful women in skimpy bikinis playing volleyball, listening to music and having a great time. "Wow!" he exclaims, "Hell looks great! I'll take Hell!"

Instantly the programmer finds himself in red-hot lava with demons tearing at his flesh. "Where's the beach? The music? The women?" he screams frantically to the angel.

"That was the demo," the angel replies as she vanishes.

---------------------
1% share is often an outcome of aiming at too large an initial market. I respectfully disagree with your concerns about starting too small. I would start as small as possible and then scale up.

"it doesn't matter how many potential customers there are...you have to communicate your product and its benefits to each of them individually."

Once you get to reasonable share (e.g. 1/6) your existing customers will help you communicate it to other members of the niche.
Facebook apps are doomed.

That said, I wish these guys the best of luck. I give them props for this tidbit alone:

"Serious Business leverages the core competencies of our world renowned team to create revolutionary new synergies which tap in to blue ocean markets in the social platform mashup internets. Serious Business will forever redefine the way we use the web - even the way we see life itself."
I remember that post, I wish that woulda been implemented, it was such a great idea.
Just strap your laptop to the steering wheel and put the seat back.
I would assume they would sort of have to take this line. Not so great at public relations otherwise.
Kudos. I'd have to say that that is spot on. I almost want to wip out my text editor and throw a page up right now just so I can use this :-)
I have no comment that an act of charity is reported with such ego, but this line kills me:

The kids each got a toy and some treats.

Am I the only one that finds it completely unacceptable that we have children eating at a charitable kitchen in this day and age? Something is definitely wrong with all of us.
I'd like an invite too =)
And this is after the housing bubble? Ugg, I feel sad because I'll never actually have the guts to move out of the US :-(
Fortress - New Language for Supercomputers (Talk by Guy Steele)
When I read Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" (an excellent book, btw), one thing jumped out at me regarding physics research centers in the first half of the 20th century.

PhD students and postdoctoral research fellows may have been engaged (commonly for many years to someone back home), but were expected not to wed. You were supposed to throw yourself entirely at your field of research in the beginning of your career, and place the rest of your life entirely on hold.
Isn't paypal a secure financial escrow service?
CLiki : CL-AJAX
This is really interesting.

I've personally found the 120-135 degree angle the most comfortable.. I'd previously thought it was terrible for my back, perhaps not!

I've actually been looking for a way to use a laptop or PC comfortably while lying on a couch. Does anyone have any recommendations for this kind of usage?

An optical mouse is great because you don't need a flat surface. On-screen keyboard is also great if you really cant be f'ked. :P
Valve's Source Engine Coming To Linux
One of the first pieces of great advice I got from my first real programming mentor was to never learn COBOL, or someone will make you write it. :-)

After you learn first hand why no good hacker wants to write COBOL, you might want to heed a related piece of advice: never admit you can write COBOL to anyone, for precisely the same reason. :-)

My condolences on your new job, but I hope you make good money and do something fun with it.
Using mu bands that have direct correlation to thinking about the action in question is a great way to go here.

I love this concept. Much better than the gaming BCI's that are coming out that rely on non-corollary telemetry (Inducing the user to say, artificially raise their beta wave amplitude in order to walk forward for example)

These sorts of BCI's are dangerous in my opinion because choosing an arbitrary brainwave to map to a particular function in a game is a horrible idea when those waves are medically proven to be indicative of certain brain states.

ADD for instance is known to present elevated theta waves in the patient, and ADHD is correlated with high beta wave activity.

Imagine the havoc that a game BCI which asks the user to manipulate those levels in some arbitrary manner to play a game. No thank you.
I habitually put my feet on the edge of the desk at work. I find that I just can't stand the stress of other positions. I already have scoliosis; why should I make my suffering worse?
I found this talk extremely interesting. Of note, he describes:

How they're making syntax close to that of mathematical notation.

How a huge number of programming statements can be modeled by a generator, a comprehension, and a reducer.

How they're using traits, a variant of multiple inheritance, to encode and test for algebraic properties.

How, knowing these algebraic properties, and knowing specifics of the hardware system, generators, comprehensions and reducers can derive a parallelization strategy.

I'm excited enough by this language I've actually started to use it, for numerical work. It's not mature -- there's no compiler, just an interpreter -- but the input method is easier than latex, so at worst I'll have well typeset pseudocode. :-)
This is pretty sweet, I've been a big fan of Processing for ages.

Processing reminds me of what was great about languages like QBasic. You could draw graphics on the screen and animate them without needing to understand how to use complicated graphics libraries.

It doesn't necessarily need to be fast, it just needs to be easy and fast-enough!
Sitting is very bad for backs. Standing is very good. This is what many experts on the subject of computer ergonomics remind us every year. I think the whole logic behind this is simply that if your body becomes accustomed to sitting, your standing and walking posture will be "look" less human the longer this is done, which is already a good sign that something is wrong, never mind the pain that might already be a good indicator. So the alternative is to optimize your body for standing and walking, and then to sit in such a way such that it doesn't affect your standing and walking. Doing so won't hurt your back when you sit or walk, which proves the human body was not designed for sitting for hours at a time, but for upright movement. It's not something a person does that's bad, it's just the way the human body has evolved over the years.

The first problem I see with this report is that there is no mention of which chair was used and how long the subjects had to adjust to it. They probably had people sit down in a study-provided chair for a minute, then took the scans. It's possible the subjects didn't really get into as comfortable or realistic position as they could have, given a couple of weeks to adjust to the chair, or to bring their own.

Secondly, if one works out, they may be able to sit upright and still have great posture without slouching. It would be nice if a follow up study was done with subjects who work out regularly.

It would nice to know what the purpose of the chair was, as well--to allow users to sit in the "proper" way given measurements made by the manufacturer, or to compensate for the more realistic way a human might sit? I've read that car seats have been redesigned because of the discovery that people don't actually sit the same way as expected, though I don't recall if this was a comparison of American sitting habits between this decade to another, or that of Americans drivers compared to those of other countries.

Finally, the suggested solution should not have been to sit at 120-135 degrees, but to exercise regularly, weight train, and take frequent breaks.
I use Aerons. But I've been able to make every
chair I've ever used do this. It's hilarious to me
to see that I've been doing the right thing all along,
after about 20 years of sitting in what everyone
(including me) supposed was a preposterously
unergonomic posture.
Do you think that it is possible to have a single product, but a "two-legged" marketing approach that caters to the center of both those bell curves? Are there any examples of this? I'd argue that as a brand, Apple does this (High end graphics guys love Apple, as do college chicks)
It is is somebody writes "four billion" on a check and hands it to them. Heck, money's not worth anything unless we agree it is anyway.
What an awesome thing to do. He's the man.
Social portability: The long view. (Re:Liberated Twitter)