skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I explained the Web, not the Internet, to a relative with zero computer knowledge as follows:

* think about magazines and how they're made

* you have to put all the text and pictures together, then you have to print them in a huge printing plant, load them onto a thousand trucks and take them around the country

* it's slow, it's very expensive, and you might end up with millions of magazines that nobody wants, and have to throw them away

Now, imagine someone though of a better way.

Instead of you having to print the magazine on paper and take them to people, you let people's computers come to the magazine's offices and take a copy of the magazine. Then they read the magazine on the computer.

They seemed to take it well.

As far as explaining how the internet works, I've always said "you don't need to", any more than you need to explain how the phone systems works.

But how the phone system works is instructive. There are all the different countries around the world, using different languages, different equipment, different voltages for their power, but somehow, we got them all to agree on some things, so you can just pick up a phone, anywhere in the world, and dial another phone anywhere else in the world.

That's how the internet "works". Everyone has agreed on the right way for computers to talk to each other. The details are meaningless.
Consulting agreements
Was wondering if anyone can either share or point me where I can get a standard web consulting agreement I can use for a project I will be starting soon.

Thanks in advance
/Alex
Has anybody tried (or been made to try) pair programming? Was it cool or did it suck?

Being somewhat introverted, I think it could be fun to do with a friend, but with a coworker who I didn't have the same level of rapport with, it would just be aggravating.
i program with a partner constantly.

for basic/obvious/trivial tasks it's a waste of time and we split up to get through it quicker.

but for breaking new ground and finding solutions on the fly it's been very helpful.
What's the big deal with Terminal.app? I honestly don't see it--maybe I'm not power user enough, but it's fine for me.
It could be the brightness.

I am going to go with a random guess here: You have large pupils. I have large pupils myself and it was actually a slight risk for laser eye surgery and my night vision is a bit blurred (not from the laser eye, from the large pupils). I find most new LCDs too bright and it hurts my eyes. I am forced to turn down my new HDTV to 50% brightness!

So, turn down the brightness and be careful with laser eye to ensure the equipment is suitable for large pupils (most newer lasers do a much larger radius than the first ones).

Or, I am way off and its something else :)
You could argue that in many cases they have actively tried to improve the UNIX way of doing things, which hasn't really taken hold with anyone outside of Apple (for example, launchd).
The assignments on there seem very 'one time'-ish. Sure, I can put a set of 10 pictures and have them rate them, but we're looking for a much higher volume, and the ability to constantly add more pictures.
I did it for a college project once. It was fun, mostly because we were building something we already had defined, so it was just a matter of implementation and mutually learning the environment (we were using Max/MSP). It probably worked because we were in unfamiliar territory; if we both knew the lang inside and out, I bet we would have just bitten off a bigger chunk and each done our own portion and evolved it further.

I don't think I could do it on a significant project, because I'm always making a bunch of tiny changes that I wouldn't want to have to explain/suggest. Collaboration on a single problem is helpful. Collaboration on a single work of art isn't always. Could you imagine pair painting?
Like many have said it is all a personal preference. You will get reasons from Mac users why OSX is better and you will get reasons from Linux users why Ubuntu is better......both are great Operating Systems, but in the end it is just a personal preference.

And like others have also said I think the best way to figure out which you like better is to dual boot. Try both the GNOME and KDE environments too.

I personally have been using Linux/Ubuntu for the last 2 years and have not found anything that I can not do that I absolutely need. I love the ability to customize everything.

In the end the reason I prefer Linux/Ubuntu is because I like the FOSS ideology and the people/community behind it. I can find a free Open Source application for almost everything, and if I have an issue I have thousands of Linux users who have probably already come across it and know how to solve it. The community has also put together a great idea-brainstorming site called Ubuntu Brainstorm to better improve the OS for the users. Oh and Ubuntu 8.04 comes out in just a few days!
Fail. Econ 101: wealth is created via division of labor, not consolidation of labor.
Interesting question. I think it would be hard. Maybe you could leave in occasional chatty bits to preserve that tone, at the cost of only a little extra length.
For debugging it's amazingly effective. Even simple coding comes out amazingly bug free when you have a second set of eyes watching as you go. I second that it is intense. I accomplish much more than I would by myself, but I always feel very used up afterwards.
You get better at deletion. When you first start writing, it's hard to delete stuff because it cost you a lot of effort to write it. As you get more confident, you get more ruthless in that respect: "This is crap. Out with it."

Editing is writing, however, and the hardest part of writing is thinking. I don't feel I've gotten much better at that.
Now we can finally live ethically sound cannibalistic lifestyles, not having to subsist on that horrible Hufu!

Maybe my new company can sell "Man in a Can".
I usually learn from these essays, but I've always found them somewhat grating. Some perceive the style as confrontational, but I think that's unreasonable intellectual defensiveness that pg so often picks apart.

These deletions have helped me realize why these essays bother me, on a stylistic level. The cadence is very regular and robotic. It's easy to anticipate the switches from descriptions of conventional wisdom to a different way of framing the problem, and easy to anticipate that there will be a conventional wisdom to roast.
And what was the result of this marvelous interlude? The author never tells us.
That first batch was actually great. It had both Reddit and Loopt in it, plus Firecrawl, which morphed into Textpayme, plus Justin and Emmett, who went on to do Justin.TV after selling Kiko.

Reddit was a merger of 2 startups from that batch, so if you count Loopt as a success (a fairly safe bet), 4/8 succeeded: Reddit, Infogami, Textpayme, and Loopt. I'd be delighted if we managed to achieve a 50% success rate ongoing.
Is it genuinely hard to read? YC News uses small grey text over a white background.
"So their use of the drugs would interfere with my freedom of choice."

You are not entitled to particular choices, but are free to choose among what others may have made available.

It's no violation of rights that you don't get the choice you might prefer. If I get to the movie's five minutes before you, and take a seat you may have wanted, I'm not violating any of your rights of free choice because I parked my ass in a chair before you could.
Non-glossy, non-TN (MVA/PVA/S-IPS only), low brightness, no buzzing/high-pitched noises. Then adjust monitor distance from your head. Check hardforum's Displays section - good widescreen monitors start at $700 (since most of the 21-22" panels are TN)
Yeah - in the interview for my current C++ job, they asked not one question about C++. Now, it might be surmised that they could tell I was reasonable by my resume but in fact, the level of their code was (is) quite low, and (I swear!) some of the ppl are curious about this newfangled 'STL' thing. Yup yup yup. And, it is indeed a corporate job.
why not? I have done my best to let go of caring what people think of me or my work. I will stand behind it. If there is a problem and I fix it.
Nerdy and Edible: Fractal Cookies
Sierpinski Cookies to be more precise.
Glossiness increases the contrast between lights and darks so that movies and other things look crisper. You find it mostly on media-centered systems. On a lot of laptops it is either the only option or available for about $25 more.

I don't think OSX and Vista have too much to do with it. My brother's Macbook doesn't have a glossy screen and I'm not sure they even offer it. I'm not sure about the other models though. Vista is only software, since MSFT doesn't make the hardware on PCs, so I don't see how that contributes to glossy screens.

The reason I would give for it is that it is a way to add a feature to a product that differentiates it from other products. It doesn't matter that the glossy screens have enough negative effects to counter the 1 advantage. Company A came out with it to sell more computers, so companies B, C, and D all had to develop their own version to compete. Consumers can be silly that way. I was.
Git may be more important for a startup. I'm guessing the typical startup, particularly YC types, will be using a ton of open source. Git enables you to take all the open source libraries you depend on, branch them, add the little changes you need, and merge things back from upstream (or contribute back, of course).

This is a huge win over the hacky way things are done with svn externals or svn + patches.
I think that intimacy is the awkwardness that's natural to real time conversation. Like where he knocks passion fruit. I laughed because of how out of tone it seemed.
Linux can't compete with Textmate? You must be kidding me. I could make fun of Textmate and 37 signals who popularized it, but I really don't want to start flamewars. Come on... Unix is the king when it comes to text editors for programmers: vim&emacs rule.

Besides, there is simply co much to look at when it comes to pedestrian text editing (Textmate style): netbeans, komodo, eclipse+plugins, aptana - all built for Linux first, OS X - second.
You probably got a TN panel.
>Git enables you to take all the open source libraries you depend on, branch them, add the little changes you need, and merge things back from upstream (or contribute back, of course).

So that's what git does. Thanks for the one sentence explanation.
If you want to read more about the PSD culture at Bear Stearns, check out Bear's long-term CEO, book: "Memos form the Chairman"

http://www.amazon.com/Memos-Chairman-Alan-C-Greenberg/dp/076...
No Alan Turing? I am surprised. I always thought the cover of ANSI Common Lisp was a nod towards his life (and death).

For those of you who do not know much about the Alan Turing man, I suggest that you check out one of the excellent biographies that have been written about him. He was a really amazing and interesting guy. And the persecution that lead to his suicide provides a valuable (and tragic) lesson on the evils of homophobia.
I've found Five Guys to be really inconsistent from store to store... the local one always serves dried out burgers but the DC metro area Five Guys do it right.
Flow. When pair programming works, you can pair together for hours and be very productive. I can recall some marathon pair-programming sessions where we mind-melded and got things done very quickly.

If there is an imbalance in skills, pair programming will sometimes devolve into one of the developers asserting control and dominating.

The lowest-common denominator form of pair programming "Can you take a look at my code?" is very effective for finding bugs. Simply having to explain yourself can reveal issues.

I hate the term "Can I drive now/do you want to drive" for pair programming.
How to Fix Venture Capital (VCs are too risk-averse and think too short-term)
I'm currently using OSX at work and Vista at home. Over the years I've tried many OSs, including various flavors of Linux and BSD. I think I can answer your question very simply: they all suck, and you have to find which one sucks the least for you.

For me, OSX is mostly eye candy any keyboard junkie should steer clear of. Also, it tends to be sluggish and not as responsive as other OSs I've tried. The spinning beach ball (I call it the pizza of boredom) is a very common sight.

Linux is about plug and pray. Maybe, hopefully, if you're lucky, things work out well on your computer. I mean come on, Ubuntu, in 2008, made a big fuss about the new (yes new) screen manager that lets you visually control multi-monitor setups. Whoopie. Welcome to the '90s.

Vista is rubbish. SP1 made it better but it's still annoying. If it weren't for the hassle, I'd switch back to XP. More than OSX, the eye candy is very distracting and useless.

XP is old but darn good, kinda like an old pair of jeans. It has flaws but they're familiar and known-enough to be fixable.

So should you switch from OSX->Ubuntu? Is your software Ubuntu ready? Are you ready to drop to the command line fairly regularly? Are you ready for a different GUI? It's certainly doable, and perhaps easy, but it's a lot of "easy" steps to be taken. That may be too much work for you.

Good luck.

Pierre
Thanks for posting this.

It kind of confirms why I don't really bother to read blog posts that are just rants. I wonder what he has to say about Reddit today...
The Evolution of a Programmer
This post make me smile.:)
Google...didn't sell out....Because Google had a deeply felt sense of purpose: a conviction to change the world for the better.

This reads well, but I believe it's false. From what I've heard, the Google founders were willing to sell at various points, but they always asked more than acquirers were willing to pay. Just like Facebook.

The real problem with VCs is not that they're inclined to sell out early. As a rule, founders are the ones who want to sell out; investors would rather the founders kept working to generate them more upside.

The reason there aren't more Googles is not that VCs encourage radically innovative startups to sell out, but that they don't even fund them. One of the things that has surprised me most about VCs is how conservative they are. They're terrified of doing anything novel, in case it blows up and their partners laugh at them. They won't invest in anything unless everyone thinks it's a good idea. Which is a problem because really novel ideas always seem like mistakes to most people.
office has an uninstaller
Retinal Imaging Display Glasses Make Terminator Vision Possible
"By the end of the session, they had managed to hack the pretty print source code to just under 100 lines."
Lessons Learned - “A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.”
I like In-n-Out's approach. They have a simple upfront menu, but a secret menu if you want something different. The mystery aspect creates an in-crowd, who'll be more loyal.

Google and Apple seem to take this approach too. I don't see anyone trying to guess Microsoft's next big thing.
How much would you pay to have a small memory chip implanted in your brain?
> For me, OSX is mostly eye candy any keyboard junkie should steer clear of.

Actually, when I got my Mac, one of the things that really surprised me was how many other Mac people use keyboard shortcuts for everything. I think that, contrary to what one might expect, having a particularly mouse-intensive environment actually induces people to learn keyboard shortcuts more, to become more efficient.
Bill Gates's Wish Is Homeland Security's Command
I'm making this switch right now... I was getting ready to buy a macbook pro to replace my macbook, and made the realization that I use OS X to run *nix applications; so why not jump directly over to linux?

I'll be keeping an eye on this thread =D
I use Ubuntu at work, OSX at home. I've customized Ubuntu with Avant Window Navigator to make it a little more Mac-like (once you start using a Dock, it's hard to give it up).

I've gotta say I agree with people who say it's easier to develop on Ubuntu. E.g., to do Django development on my Mac with Postgres, I needed to install an alternate, MacPorts version of Python (which ends up in /opt/local/bin/python2.4, not in /usr/bin/python), get the Postgres driver from MacPorts, then do all of my Django development with the alternate python installation. Yecch. The Postgres driver wouldn't compile otherwise.

On Ubuntu, I just apt-get'd the packages and started developing.

And don't even get me started on Java development in the two environments (yeah, I know, I'm a loser Java developer). The state of the JDK on OSX has never been very clear (OpenJDK FreeBSD Based Java 6? Apple's Java 5?)

Anyway, just use what you like. If it were up to me, Ubuntu wins for hacking and development, OSX wins for usability and commercial polish, but either environment will handle both functions well enough to get you by.
The unsolved math problem
Mark Pilgrim did. Read "When the bough breaks" and other stories at http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/02/when-the-bough-b...
Why Your Social Website Should Support OpenID
I was born and raised on vim. I love it. I use it exclusively from any CLI I come across. I agree with you, it rules.

From my Leopard desktop I can use Textmate and vim simultaneously. And I do. All day. I can't do that in Ubuntu.
I see an anology with lazy or run-of-the-mill programmers. Does the popularity of boilerplate allow some people to feel a sense of accomplishment with shallow efforts of thought per LOC?
Non-citizens can now work on a U.S. startup for ~2.5 years after graduation
The Department of Homeland Security just extended the Optional Practical Training period that international students gets on their F-1 visa after graduation from 12 to 29 months (for students graduating in science / math / engineering). This should be enough time to get a startup off the ground before having to worry about applying for a longer-term visa (usually an H-1B).
Sell ads on what? Those sites are buyers of ads. They do the conversion of traffic.

I should have made more clear that this is a longer term strategy, and yes, indeed more expertise is needed in these industries. However, what these industries do is not rocket science, and can be reproduced over time.

My point is that SN sites could eventually do the conversion of that sort of traffic themselves, and gain higher CPM In the Long Run. This process would take years, but is rewarding in the end.
I understood what you're saying. I think it's a great idea.
wealth for an entire nation/world certainly is, but not necessarily wealth for a specific company, especially in the situation I speak of.
There's a program called AppFresh for OS X that checks all your application's versions against the latest known version.
Building a multi-gigapixel digital camera
-The SN network in this situation would be acting as a "holding" company. It does not expand into anything itself. The child companies do, and gain expertise (by possibly hiring from competitors), and also advantage by more traffic sent to them.

-That return on investment would be higher, in the long run. Yes, thats an if, but its a much better if than "social graphs completely turning around CPM for something like FB".

Those are also, by their opposite, reasons why companies consolidate and acquire...
I don't know what he's saying, but personally I'm still not sure why anyone paid money for it.
As I read this, I can't help but think that some very interesting things were cut out in editing. I almost wish I could see more unedited versions of pg's essays.
This change is meant to help new employees at big companies, not necessarily people in startups. Notice that the ruling follows on the heals of the 1-apr H1B 2008 application date, wherein the quota was exceeded on the first day, inducing a lottery. The same thing happened last year. Under this ruling new students graduating and going to work at big companies will have two shots at the H1B lottery.

That said, startups will benefit from the same treatment.

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H1B_visa#Quotas_and_changes_in_...)
Facebook potentially offers the best kind of advertising: referrals.

The social graph gives companies the data they need to target this kind of advertising. However, this means companies need to be less exploitative and work more with their consumer. I see this as being a bigger benefit for smaller, more personable seeming companies.
There's pizza, and there's junk pizza. I think you mean the latter. A good pizza can be pretty healthy -- certainly it doesn't seem to do the Italians any harm in terms of life expectancy.
Nice guide. Will save me a lot of typing.
I believe it was for the pretty print code of emacs
Interestingly, parallel programming theory comes into play here. There is a sweet spot between completely distributing an algorithm and completely consolidating an algorithm that allows it to scale effectively with more processors.
Normally I find your commentary extremely perceptive, but this time I think that you're off the mark. JMHO

Why, thank you! In this case, my writing may be completely off base, but it has achieved its victory condition: It has drawn you out to provide a very intelligent level of argument. ;)

And I am operating at a severe disadvantage... all I know about Google (and about Python and Django, for that matter) is what I read in the papers. You really can't learn much about what's going on inside Google from the papers.

That's a big part of the problem here: with Google Apps the company seems to be gearing up to make a transition toward more transparency, but they're not quite there yet. I am fully willing to admit that Google's infrastructure kicks the butt of a $7 web host... once I know what I'm getting, what the charge is, and what the service level will be. I certainly agree that the various limitations we can see now -- Python only, limited static files, limits on peak bandwidth, no SSL for now, blah blah blah -- will all be forgivable, even trivial, once we have confidence that Google will deliver cheap scalability and rock-solid operational performance -- and once there are well-understood approaches and tools for deploying Google Apps without "marrying oneself to the Google toolset". But for much of their history Google's reputation has been kind of like Batman's reputation: They're known to be superheroes, they have many wonderful toys, they use them mostly for good and we're very grateful... but they operate in the shadows, and folks often complain that it's hard to get them on the phone to explain exactly why your pagerank just dropped by fifty spots overnight, or exactly how they control your ad revenue for false clicks.

I don't attribute any of that to malice, though. And it's early in the history of the beta of Google Apps (a real beta, not one of those legendary eternal "betas"), so we must be patient. Certainly your words are cause for optimism.
A simple example of Radix Sort (a linear-time sorting algorithm)
I find that my Dell laptop bothers me when uncalibrated.

The Pantone Huey is what I use to calibrate my Macs and PCs, and it makes a huge difference, with my Dell Precision Laptop being much much easier to work with after calibration.

http://www.amazon.com/Pantone-Monitor-Color-Calibrator-MEU10...
Some very sane advice from a very sane person. It's a bit different from what other people would tell you. I especially like the way he addresses how startup culture worships youth. And also about the balance of life thing. These are good things to keep in mind when your neck deep in your startup.
+1, Ergotron. Much more useful than you would actually think. You can change the monitor's position and angle to anything you want, multiple times per day.
It does, but middle or right clicking is rather awkward (2/3 finger taps, awkward key combinations)
How effecient is your coding?
I just use linux on my servers and OS X on my desktop. Works very well for me and I'm sure it also does for other people.
Way better than lolcode :)