skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm doing just that. Not everybody at Hacker News is going to become a successful founder who ends up selling their startup for millions of dollars. I fucked up my shot at it and ended up in tons of debt. If I had followed Paul Graham's advice and been 23 and childless I would take another shot at it, but as it is I need a job that pays real money, not a long shot at becoming rich. I'm sure I'm not the only one here who will end up getting a job.

Pharmacy pays better than most software jobs, is more stable, has a more flexible schedule, has plenty of jobs outside of places where a shitty little house costs a million bucks, and the process of becoming a pharmacist is not nearly as hellish as the process of becoming a researcher (as an undergrad I decided I didn't want to go to grad school, and I didn't even have a family that couldn't possibly be supported by a grad student's miserable stipend). My program is 3 years and does not involve being a professor's slave.

I don't see why I would prefer to become a software engineer anyway. Both involve programming, but a startup founder solves his own problems while software engineers solve somebody else's. To me, that's a critical difference.

Anyway, I admit I would have preferred to have become a successful startup founder, but other than that pharmacy is about as good as it gets. There's a reason that 16 applicants were rejected for every one that was accepted to my program, and it's not because the career is only slightly preferable to shoveling shit in Louisiana.
Microsoft EULA lands it with $175m Indian tax headache
What's keeping us from Mars? Space rays, say experts
A surprise conversation with Larry Ellison
"... Try Mozex ..."

Wow I'm editing with it now & it works well. Some observations:

- It would be nice if it was just concentrated on editing.

- Certainly a much nicer alternative than the textbox

- miss the spelling syntax highlighting

- It doesn't appear to allow you to edit in the textbox after editing :(

- you need to :wq! & hit enter to save

Can be found at http://mozex.mozdev.org/development.html
I have worked for a mail-order pharmacy and I can confirm that this is absolutely true. Our software was written in COBOL and run on an emulator for some old alpha machine. It had countless bugs, was slow (even though it had a curses-like console interface), and required the user to manually do things that no human should do. With better software we could have probably done the job with less than half, maybe even a quarter, of the staff we had (maybe 150 people). I think that some smart hackers and good managers (you need a call center and a fulfillment center so it's not a hackers-only task) could knock them over.

More generally, I would bet that there are countless startup opportunities in fields that don't get a lot of love from hacker types, because they don't know about it. Not every niche involves social networks and tags.
Surely that doesn't mean that in your earlier comment being a startup founder is satisfying and functional in a way that is not good and right.
Zuckerberg to host Saturday Night Live
Web 3.0 belongs to those who control personal profile infrastructure
Anyone know of anyone who has tested the open source ERP waters?
"good old days when telephones were made for talking"

Finally. Just what I'm looking for.
My disagreement was directed at your use of Occam's Razor (which didn't even make sense), not on whether pg thinks startups are neat. Clearly, he does.
Given all the well-thought-out objections on this thread, I've decided to back out of the OpenID support I recently implemented. Details here:

http://ourdoings.com/2008-04-01
Hmm seems like a nice little tool, installed and waiting for it to fetch data.
Thanks for the tool!
Neither of these arguments even attempts to refute the central point of the essay. In case anyone wants to try it, the central point is that in an organization organized as a tree structure, structural forces tend to give each person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the whole tree.

Already done: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=142597

If I hadn't already done it, I wouldn't bother with it now, though, because:

Even these dishonest DH5s are ...

Roth's contribution is CLEARLY NOT DISHONEST (couldn't resist the uppercase here). I get the impression that the chance you would ever take advantage of any refutations to plug holes and thus further improve the standard of your essay collection is precisely zero. It's all about "picking a winner" (this term actually appears in paulgraham.com/disagree.html) instead of advancing towards the truth. Readers of your essays will do best by just enjoying the incredible density of ideas, then deciding for themselves which ones to accept, rather than following the "comment" link at the bottom.

If anyone has a link to an instance where Paul Graham helps the search for the truth by conceding a nontrivial point in an argument, I would be grateful. That would help repair my impression, and probably some other people's as well.
Hackers and Hackers 2
Tips on Taking Photographs with a Digital Camera
Digital Photo Workflow
What is a Digital Raw File?
About Colour Management
The ability to quickly learn new things like monads and mod_rewrite.
Which means that on a smaller plane on a full flight, you may have to gate check your bag, leaving you lined up on the gateway when unboarding.

I agree with you -- lining up sucks. What I tend to do is review my seats when I check in electronically, and if there is a decent number of open seats, I can count on the overhead space being available. If there's only a few open seats, it might be worthwhile to line up to avoid gate checking.
The Stupidest bike lane in america
well hopefully others can add some niceties to it
Coding tips: Generational Naming
Concurrency Oriented Programming in Erlang [video]
The presentation slides are here: http://ll2.ai.mit.edu/talks/armstrong.pdf
Two peanuts were walking down the street and one was assaulted...peanut.

April Fools!
Jessica Livingston to speak at Business of Software 2008
How do you feel about dispensing birth control?
Google Wants To Put The First Human Colony On The Moon. Want to Help?
There's a good list at http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/01/build-your-very-own-goo...

Yay for random contests + me staying up late to win them :)
It shouldn't end at the users ISP. This ties the user to a using a certain ISP, or they have to give up their online identity.
I've never found these web April Fools jokes all that interesting. Usually Google does something that the world geeks out over while I sit bored.

April Fools, they ROCK!

No, April Fools again, they're dull. Really.
If only I had a printer in my hotel room, I would've given you a run for your money on the distance prize :)
I have used 1and1.com and have been pleased. I also used GoDaddy and somehow have developed the ability to ignore their incessant advertisements.

Chris
Ask YC: What are you working on right now?
What's the startup, project you're working on right now?

I'm working on ONE, which is a collaboration platform for projects, tasks, invoices, ...

Want to bring some of the YC spirit back here, so many posts about normal internet stuff.
I can beat that easily (in Germany). Plenty of bike lanes where it is actually much more dangerous to use the bike lane than to just drive on the road.
I don't think there is a robots.txt, and I remember comments that crawling HN is OK, at a reasonable rate.
I'm working on a photo hosting service, http://Simplebucket.com
Basically, I relaunched the service on March 20th with a new interface, look and a bunch of other features. Now I'm working on a feature "Beeps" for our next release. "Beeps" is the social part of Simplebucket. That's all I can say for now.
I'm working on a quad-venti latte at the moment.

:)
Interesting, I registered "bookmarkbucket.com", partially with similar intentions.
I'm working on a member management system targeting a small niche market. Currently waiting on design revisions, my designer is coming up with some pretty unique stuff so I don't want to code too much since a lot will need to be rewritten around his designs.
I am working on a kids MMO with a very cool spin on it. Getting the Business Plan and pitch worked out...
I'm working on a small project related to baby naming which is a toy to get me familiar with RoR and experiment with building a registrationless user experience.

It's just an evening project and should be online later this week on Heroku.
Back when I was coding a lot, there were two editors, vi and one other that came with the Unix variant we had. The other "visual" editor had an annoying tendency to convert multiple spaces to tabs if it was able to. This broke formatting and messed up make files. It sparked a holy war against those who "maintained" code with that editor, calling for those people to use vi and stop breaking things.
Apple seeks to break iPhone Canada deadlock
A photo hosting app?
Perception, creativity and paint color
Client's print server crashed in the middle of the night. Month end accounting batch (written by idiots) updated databases before encountering dead end at printing. Accounting wants their reports, but there aren't any. Can't restore because sales & fulfillment have already done many database updates before I was called. Not sure what to do.

Today I was going to add a few features to my web app. Instead, I guess I'll be changing 20 year old programs to not update databases, but print reports. I think. Not sure.

So I thought I would just have a cup of Columbian Supreme, a donut, and a quick visit here. Makes about as much sense as anything else.

(If only this were an April Fools joke.)
The most striking thing is not the no flips, no folds... there's no screen.
Does this mean that nowadays you can expect emacs to be installed on every system? From what I've seen, still no. So basic vi skills are still needed. But nowadays, there are many ways to avoid having to edit files with vi. If a system has sftp access you can mount it's file system via sshfs and edit files from your main machine in emacs. This way you could even have the files version controlled on your main machine. There's also tramp mode of course, but sshfs works better.
$20?! What, is it made of diamonds?

My current phone is AT&T's $10 Go Phone (some kind of LG), and it has a color screen, customizable menus, and better voice quality than my previous phone (an LG flip phone). It's also light, small and has decent battery life.

Of course, I'm just waiting till I'm eligible for an upgrade so I can get an iPhone . . .
Haha...if that is the case, then I am not sure it is the best named domain :)
Turning off OpenID support. Details here: http://ourdoings.com/2008-04-01
This: http://taggl.net/

Almost done!
Photohosting among other things, yes.
The idea is/was to do much more than just photohosting.
I'm working on bug.gd, our error search engine.

Specifically, we just announced/launched an experimental tool for (any) Python interactive interpreter. Whenever you run into an error, you can do a quick search for how other people got past the same error.
Silicon Valley VCs versus Canada 
I am considering taking my pitch to SV. As a Canadian corp, is this a good idea or bad. I don't want to move to SV, but want to have a crack at the VC's. Can it be done??? I know that Flickr did it but eventually had to move down...or do SV_VC's not interested in Canadian opportunities...
Probably there needs to be another network infrastructure change before the masses adopt large numbers of cores. By that I mean, that current broadband will have to increase again to higher speeds. I mean, it makes sense that your parents can still run a 3-4 year old system if the most cpu intense program they run is Skype. These programs probably won't need the crazy cores until they start processing far greater amounts of data.

However, there is the issue that your typical user interface is becoming more and more graphic intensive. And there's always that end consumer that runs a million apps and never closes them. A few of my non-computery friends are like that and have a bajillion things in their system tray. They too will probably see performance improvements from multiple cores, long before the apps they use take advantage of it, simply because of their habits.
For those looking for reset css, check here:
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/01/reset-reloaded/
A bucket for any type of bookmark?
The online store/catalog in AWDR was non-interesting so I'm iterating a clone of Buxfer's iPhone webapp (while I teach myself Ruby-on-Rails). I have no intention of competing against Buxfer - I use their app for real expense reporting instead of my crude app - their iPhone application is a excellent example of a iPhone webapp.
A new way to create software and a new operating system built from the ground up based on it.
Locality of concerns. I've come to realize that the fundamental issue in programming is that we all look at the universe through finite brain-sized portholes. Higher order languages, structuring systems in abstraction hierarchies, and software architecture research are all attempts to organize arbitrarily large systems so that they can be understood in brain-sized chunks. One might say that well-designed large systems have a sort of fractal nature; it is possible to zoom in and out, and gain useful insight at multiple different levels.
Married and the third child on the way!!!! They can be scary... yet so beautiful and amazing.
Nope. It's neutral.
redesign of http://thefeelgood.com/
Roth's contribution is probably not dishonest, it's just shoddy thinking.

Paul is not saying that there's some kind of moral or ethical imperative to working in small groups. He just observes that it works well. So there is no fallacy, though I can see how Roth could have gotten this mixed up.

Second, it is just silly to try to refute the notion that we might be good at and enjoy anything we might have evolved to do. For one thing, that's clearly the case -- evolution works well. For another thing, PG's not trying to prove anything, he's relating his personal experience and forwarding a theory that might explain it.

The fact that people were so bothered by this is the most telling fact. As Abbie Hoffman used to say, if someone ever says something that gets your goat, they struck gold!
working on a tool related to the medical insurance billing industry.

not reinventing the wheel, just hoping to make some money so i can afford to reinvent the wheel later. :)
Looks cool. Did you use a PHP framework for the admin backend, or did you write everything from scratch?
Why should someone who is interested in programming languages learn category theory and what is the best (preferably online) text?
I'm working on a webapp to let people create their own games. Just finished e-mailing with a prospective cofounder (he turned me down, sigh), now going to start coding up some enhancements to collision detection.
eBay killer.
The Ancient Mechanics and How They Thought
Maybe they are not subsidizing the cost of the hardware with the service price?
A+++ would limerick again.
April Fool! The Purpose of Pranks
One of the problems I had with them in C was the weird syntaxes. `load` & `store` instructions are much easier to understand.
Acquiring domain-knowledge is a huge plus. You might try Pharmacy and later try finding an unoccupied niche. Once you've found a niche & you've reasonable hacking skills you can do wonders. I think it's a reasonable combination (software skills+pharmacy).
In India, handsets are never bundled with the service.
I'm the author of the linked article (and of the ViEmu products). Thank you guys for taking some time to read it.

The funny thing is that having vi/vim editing inside Visual Studio is bringing in new converts:

http://www.jpboodhoo.com/blog/GettinJiggyWithVIM.aspx

http://www.jpboodhoo.com/blog/HookedOnVIM.aspx

Of course I'm not impartial, but I would recommend you consider giving it a try if you have access to vi, vim, or emulation for them in your IDE (and some time).

I miss having it in Firefox textareas (such as when typing this comment). I don't like using an external text editor for this - integration is everything to me. I'd happily pay for it, and I'm sure others would, too, although of course it's not a big market. Anyone up to the task?
Does anyone else resort to writing vi commands down on paper when they are writing in pen or have no eraser for corrections?
The only thing here I actually would want the pharmacist to do is ask the questions.

Well, sure. I'll go ahead and grant you that. But asking the right questions is a very important, very difficult art. The answers depend on which questions are asked, and how.

People sometimes forget stuff, whereas a database doesn't.

True, and lots of mistakes are made because of inadequately systematized drug dispensing systems. But I'm not saying that your pharmacist shouldn't be highly augmented by powerful computer technology. Just that there's going to be a human pharmacist in that loop for the foreseeable future.

There are drugs that don't require pharmacists: we call them over-the-counter drugs. Maybe someday our computers will get so good that every drug will be OTC... but I'm not an optimist. At some point designing drug cocktails becomes an art: There's no optimum to seek, because there are a number of different goals that one could pursue and tradeoffs one could make. That takes an artist -- a consulting artist, like an architect or a decorator. And that, in turn, takes serious social skills that computers don't have.
Hey, now you're on to something! ;)

bookmarks
"picture"marks
"socialmedia"marks...
Please explain source control, because I still don't understand it. I don't understand how a source control system could do merging without knowing about the format of the files. It's currently based on a string merge, but this doesn't seem principled and it's not correct in many cases, or is it? On the other hand it often works in practice.
I am also working on an MMO. It's a space game. My spin is that everything in this game will be emergent. The players can design and play anything in this game, or it will evolve through genetic algorithms. I've worked out how to do most of this. I'm still working out how to evolve NPC ship AIs, but that's not the most important.

Also, everything in this game will be scriptable. Users will be able to create programs to control anything, then license those programs to other users to make money. They will also be able to license designs. Exponential proliferation of designs and scripts is prevented by limiting designs per user to some maximum number.

Basically, I'm going to make a MMO, where the developers are out of the business of creating content. The users create the most compelling content anyhow. Oh, and the "gold farmers" -- I'm going to have them writing content for me! You can't beat market forces. Better to co-opt them.

You can think of this as Second Life in Space, with much easier implementation requirements.
I suggest you deploy version 1 in 24 hours and see if you get any traction?

(I wish people would tell me to do this more often with my ideas)
Working on a fresh, disruptive collaboration system for a stodgy, niche industry (will keep that bit of info under wraps for now).
Surely for it to be a joke we would have to know how you are, and care what you do. No offense but neither of those things are true.
Seems completely unrelated to HN.
For the fools (intended satire for date posted):

http://www.quicksilverweb.net/sbucks/sbcharts.htm

4 shots of expresso with milk and foam and such, venti being the large size.
With that order though, I am still unsure if it is served hot or cold. My guess is if you don't specify, it is served hot.
Sure, but in the USA you might have to wait a couple weeks or a month to see a doctor, at which point you might get about 10 minutes of their time. Unless you're Bill Gates, of course.

Also, people have multiple doctors, who prescribe multiple things... often using handwritten notes. There's no standard for medical records exchange, and if there is half the doctors aren't using it, so the receptionists tend to hand you a questionnaire and ask you for the names of all your drugs. If you fill out that form wrong... well, let's just say that the pharmacist may be one of the few people with an up-to-date, accurate, computerized list of what you've been taking. For my elderly relatives, each of whom is taking a veritable salad of drugs, I just carry a sheaf of the pharmacy's printouts and copy them directly onto the questionnaires.

And, in practice, people ask medical questions of whoever is in front of them at the time.
You only get one lifetime to do what you want to do. Touching photo essay.
amateur sport website (multisport nike+)
clinical trial data management. You wouldn't believe how tough it is to get people to let their paper go.
Agreed! The first thing I thought when I saw that phone is, "that's EXACTLY the phone I need!"

I work in a secure facility, where cameras are not allowed. Do you know how hard it is to find a phone w/o a camera in it these days? It's actually a PITA! And that's just silly... :)
Hmm.. that's actually very interesting.. My way of finding out error messages now is just to google it and then dive through all the results.
Ask YC: Easter eggs for web apps?
It seems pretty rare for web apps to have easter eggs. Why is that? It felt a lot more common in desktop development than on webapps.

Am I just overlooking them? Or do they change more often once someone finds them?

Are you putting easter eggs in any of your web apps/sites?
I rarely share details, but I will for once.

I am working on version 2 of a simple tool for a friend that he uses for some contract work in the statistical analysis field.

Version 1 was a Java app and minimally featured, version 2 is web based, done in Django and intended to be a lot more robust.
Wow, the '.' is certainly an enviable feature.

http://meghnad.iucaa.ernet.in/intranet/sysadm/help_desk/emac...
isn't reassuring either. How does C-x (, C-x ), and C-x e compare?

http://linuxgazette.net/issue47/pedersen.html
Experimenting on a web app for people to "quickly and easily" share the stuff in their heads either with words, numbers, or pictures. Very vague at this point. Still working out some details.

Keywords: functional frictionless.
Getting a job.
uhh.. that sounded like delicious
Try ViewSourceWith.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/394

You can set Vi/Vim as the default editor and use it to edit text boxes and view the page source. You can also set up other editors (e.g. Gimp for images).
Register-based yanks are longer, eg. to cut a block of code into the global clipboard so it can be pasted into another app, it's "+d}.

I find myself using `cw`, `c%`, `ct,` (change everything up till the next comma), and `ct ` (change everything up till the next space) a whole lot too. The . command (mentioned in the article) is wonderful.

Also, I love vim's macro support. For example, I usually define a macro that converts 'var' statements on separate lines into a single statement broken into multiple lines. (MTASC won't let you refer to previous vars defined in the same statement, so if I change the data dependencies, I usually have to change the formatting.) The entirety of the macro is `qa^dw>>[UP]$s,[ESC][DOWN][DOWN]q`. That's `qa` to start recording a macro into register `a`, ^ to move to the first non-blank character, dw to delete a word ('var ', in this case), >> to shift the line left by 4 spaces, UP moves up a line, $ goes to end of line, `s,` substitutes a , for the ; at the end of line, ESC gets back into command mode, the two DOWNs put me on the line below where I started, and q stops recording. Then if I want to replace 5 lines of variable declarations, I can do 5@a (invoke macro a 5 times), and since each macro ends exactly one line lower than it started, it'll do the whole block for me at once.
Front Ahead Design (FAD) Methodology