skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Amen! I optimize incrementally; sometimes when you're writing something you can tell it will be CPU-intensive or I/O intensive. You don't know how much, but you optimize it enough so that it is at least up to par with the rest of the code. It's definitely no good to leave all performance consideration to the end of the project, anymore than it would be to leave debugging to the end, and for some of the same reasons. If you have an algorithmic problem that kills performance, it might be too late to change the code to fix it. Plus, just as one bug can hide another, many performance problems won't show up if another, slower problem is overshadowing it. You have to keep a basic level of speediness to the code as its under development in order to spot sudden changes in overall performance.
Are you sure? None of us met him.
Whoa... I come back and the top story is about me. Thanks guys... I really appreciate it!

I was away for a week. I had some personal stuff to take care off and once that was done, I realized I needed to take few days to just reflect on some stuff and just do nothing. Haven't had a real vacation in quite some time so I used few days to unwind. No worries, I'll be back to regular posting soon!

PS: Now I'm off to answer a bunch of emails!
'I have special [...] Emacs keyboard shortcuts that make bookwriting a little bit like playing an organ.'
pestr.org appears to be free.
Exactly. I wonder if the follow/no follow barrier should be raised due to karma inflation, though.
Ok, sure. I'll try to see you there.
There's a startup idea somewhere in there.
Ironically, he got an invite from YC despite being a single founder -- and then turned them down.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173759

Apparently they will "take a chance" on you as a solo founder if you have an already-established profitable business you've built up over several years to the point where an M&A event is imminent.
10. At what point did you incorporate, and what entity type did you use?

11. Can you give us a ballpark on the acquisition price? Even just a "6-figures", "7-figures", "first half of 8-figures", "2nd half of 8-figures" range?

12. How long did it take you to launch?

13. Did you ever have scaling difficulties?
That's sarcasm. I'm sure Nick is a beautiful human. But ... like ... this ... is a tech news site. I'd be worried if people didn't drop off for a week or so every once in a while.
Segway! Segway! It's a Segway-motorcycle. And there's nothing wrong with that. But why does the article not mention it? Edit: Meaning Segway in the generic sense, not the brand.
Welcome back! Got a lot of heat for this post :) Anyway, the timing couldn't have been better and I am glad it made you smile.
Ask YC:  Beyond Twitter:  Why not broadcast your web surfing live but only for shared links/domains?
The idea is to that you would specify a list of URLs and/or domains that are shared and any time you browse a shared web page, your friends would see it.

By broadcast, I mean just show the URLs and possibly also their titles (without URL get parameters), not the actual screen contents.

Of course, people might use this data in some unexpected ways. For example, they might use your web surfing habits as a way to estimate your IQ.
Short pitch: NewsCred brings you all the world's most credible news in one place.

Longer pitch: Do you trust the news? How credible are the journalists and sources you turn to each day? NewsCred is a digital newspaper bringing you all the world's credible news, from your favorite sources, in one place.

Interested in our Alpha? Drop me a line at shafqat[at]newscred.com.

http://www.newscred.com
Debunking myths about the "Third World" (uses Gapminder)
This is probably the most vividly presented talk I have ever seen in my life. No wonder Google bought Gapminder immediately after this talk.
I will humbly point out that my business (Virtualmin) is the automation of systems management tasks, likewise for my hobby of the last 8+ years (Webmin). And I still consider it an absolute deal-breaker when an OS has a lifecycle less than three years (my usual upgrade cycle is usually 24-32 months...but I like to have some wiggle room, so five years is even better).

So, you're right that there is value in replicating your infrastructure on your home machine and your server, and there's definitely value in building in replicate-ability from the beginning. Nonetheless, the end-of-life of your server will catch you by surprise one day, and some security exploit will mean you have to upgrade (at least some components) under duress. And there's nothing more stressful than doing things under duress on a production server. It'll take years off your life.

BTW-I run Fedora 7 on my desktop and Ubuntu 7.10 on my laptop, and deploy to CentOS 4 and 5 on my servers, and the pain is minimal (then again, our product technically gets deployed on all of those platforms, and many more, so that cross-platform compatibility is part of what we're always testing and working on--I suspect if platform-leveling weren't part of our value I'd be more likely to standardize).
Actually at the CS department at my university we used RateMyProfessor to avoid truly bad professors, it was not just about grades you seem to be implying. We used it as a tool to protect ourselves as consumers from a business which was taking advantage of its customers by hiring trash and passing them off as professors. That's not to say all the professors were like that, but the CS department was being run that way. I'm not kidding - the school was even investigated by the FBI for the number of registered sex offenders the CS department hired as instructors.

So it was more like, "OMG! dont take professor smiths class. he harasses women and the school does nothing about it."
He definitely deserves it for that alone. Much more inspirational than already-reach-from-paypal youtube guys selling for 1.6B
I'll be a bit contrarian and say it still needs more work. I think - perhaps the business people you are targetting find themselves nodding when you say "truly paranoid", and "out of the hands of the US government", but... I think you're walking a fine line, where some may look and say "nah, I'm not one of those guys".

You'd probably have to go around asking people to get an idea that's more than just guesswork.
are you serious? you will never see a $30 a barrel ever again.
and if they attack Iran you can say hello to $200 a barrel.
That could be the prototype for Web 2.0 product names.
If anything Blogger's problems remind me of Google Pages' problems: lots of potential but feels like it's getting the short shrift. Not coincidentally, Google had decided to abandon work on Google Pages, in favor of Google Sites!

I really used to like Google Pages, and I hope they don't abandon Blogger as well.
I actually still hope the california High Speed Rail will eventually be build. That will creat ecosystems around it's stations, with higher density, that might create the blue print for better urban mass transit.

But the gas prices are not high enough for people to yet make radical chanes. When it reaches $6/gallon, then we will see some significant changes.

As history dictates, great pain and suffering is a catalyct for change. Right now gas prices are not painful enogh, there is not much will regionally, and most people don't know better, for real change to happen.
Especially the vi and emacs graphs - definitely illustrates the way it feels trying to learn them.
I don't like reddit like posts, but this is scary:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/04/2...
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2008/04/iran-w...
yes, that is called sprawling. What happens if you live in the other side of the suburb? Now you have to drive twice the amount.
When most businness are in a central downtown core, with high density (tall buildings), it creates critical mass for mass transit. Spreading out everywhere will be even worse.
Video Startups Still a Great Way to Get Funding and Not Make Money
this is done in friendfeed
How about buses? Buses don't require much infrastructure. Also, the cost scales almost linearly with the number of passengers, and they can be easily rerouted depending on demand.
The short answer is XCode, which comes on the OS install disk as an optional install (called something like "Developer Tools").

The long answer is that unless you're porting an existing C++ app, you'll want to learn Cocoa if you want to write GUI apps. It's both the only supported 64-bit API, and what the iPhone uses. There are bindings for Ruby and Python, but the native language is Objective-C. There's also a semi-supported Scheme-like language called [Nu](http://programming.nu/).

The [Purple Newfie](http://books.google.com/books?id=ns6tB-uXuxcC&dq=learnin...) book is pretty good for going the Objective-C route, but quite dated at this point.

Once you've worked through the book, you might play around with Core Data (http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Co...) and Cocoa Bindings (http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Co...), which the book totally doesn't cover but are very cool for rapid development.

And if you're deranged like me you might enjoy just randomly playing around with Interface Builder first to get a feel for what's possible without too much coding.
Europe lives fine, even with $8/gallon. One thing you will see right a way: People will drive smaller cars, and more fuel effientien ones.
Any sedan has more than enogh of ompf with 170Hp, a small hatchback with 130hm, and maybe a small SUV with 190hp.

Right now you have so many people buying v6s and v8s with no regard for fuel efficiency.
Is this the elevator pitch for Hacker News or the general public?

There are likely many people who would be interested in your service to whom "geotag" and "@town.state.gov email address" mean nothing.
Now if every site implemented something like this - I suppose that would be recreating pagerank in a way.
Keep in mind that I'm not aiming for the entire online backup market. I'm aiming for a small (but growing) corner of the market: people who care about security. Really, I'm just playing to my own strengths here -- I can't compete in the "shiny GUI" market, but security is something I'm really good at.
Can Google's New CIO Ben Fried Fill Douglas Merrill's Shoes?
I think you misunderstood my proposal.
It's actually not a pitch, it's just a free gratuitous idea. I just added it here because I didn't think it justified starting another thread.
wow solo founder! definitely an inspiration.
Elevator pitch as domain name. Well played.
Microsoft sees slide in profits
Knuth is the Warren Buffett of computers: phenomenally successful because he's a master of fundamentals, with an uncommon share of common sense. Also, a great writer (of books and software).
As an aside here, I watched startup school on justin.tv (all of it) here in Australia on the Monday morning.

Greg McAdoo's talk was excellent and included a few words on the elevator pitch; only I missed something.
At one point he used Cisco as an example of an elevator pitch, first he said what they might have done. Then he showed a slide and said, "well I don't even have to introduce this...".

Only, I couldn't read the slide!

Does anyone recall what it said?
ha! yep I remember that post, and remember being really dissapointed when you said it was in Java.

Congrats
So a more watered down and limited friendfeed?

I don't use friendfeed all that much now, so your proposal isn't that appealing to me.
I'm talking about his attitude. He contributes nothing because he turns minor points ("hey, you don't have to do a startup; you could just start your own small business" -- OK, and today is Friday) into huge shitstorms by using inflamatory language.

David likes to be a contrarian. That's not altogether bad, but a contrarian who prides himself on his arrogance(1) -- that's poison.

(1) http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-03/mf_signals

"Arrogant is usually something you hurl at somebody as an insult," Hansson said. "But when I actually looked it up — having an aggravated sense of one's own importance or abilities' — I thought, sure."

Other data points:

- http://www.flickr.com/photos/eugevon/130610241/

- http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/why_is_37signals_so_1.html

- http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/04/16/dhh-translation
The idea applies to any site -- not just social ones. So it's not a subset of friendfeed. For example, you might want to broadcast your browsing of cnn.com.

One might even approve all urls to be broadcast live for a given domain. For example, this would allow you to see what your friend is reading on reddit in real-time. But of course, you probably don't want to activate this feature for your banking site, stock trading site, etc.
The Product Guy’s Weekend Reading (April 25, 2008)
Iain Lamb: "The New Hacker's Toolkit"
With virtualization coming to the forefront, OSes are going to cease to matter very much soon.

Vista is the last gasp of a dying bloodline.
Super-short version: Tagging that works.

Tagging is widespread and well-understood, but somewhat broken. Finding and browsing using tags is slow and clumsy because current systems are pretty dumb – they have little understanding of the meaning or structure behind tags. My app makes tagging work by finding structure and enabling users to add meaning to their tags.
You might want to help explain the differences between your proposal and friendfeed, so he can better understand.
I really like the idea of self teaching educational videos. If anything, you'd be making a great contribution to society for those who can't seem to get an education for financial, etc. reasons.

It's a viable but very work intensive plan. Writing your own textbook seems like a pretty big bottleneck. In my opinion, don't waste your time writing your own textbook at first, just go straight off of an existing textbook to make your videos. Math, science, bio is math, science, bio. I don't think you'd run into any trouble unless you start copying unique problem strategies. As far as a means of donation, I think a project like this would be so highly praised that many humanitarian/university/etc. organizations would be more than willing to help fund you.

As for covering your costs, you could create your own textbooks, but not the usual type. I'd really like textbooks that are more concise and cut the crap. Just give me the damn formulas, how they work, and why we use them. Then a section of practice problems. I don't want to read about how neat it is to graph a 3d image of the shape of a cowbell using trig functions. If you could make that type of textbook, I'd buy it. Also, you always could create white label versions of your product and sell them to institutions and universities for the hosting of their own videos/podcasts for their student body.

It's an ambitious but awesome plan.
This isn't about tracking contributions to social sites.

It's about showing people what web page you are currently looking at, even if you are not contributing any content.
WebMynd has close to this functionality.
"Cisco networks networks" (or something highly similar).
Hang out in San Fran
Anyone around San Francisco tonight, tomorrow? Wanna go for a drink or two and i am on my own. If you guys are done with interviews or are here early or live around gimme a call. 646 633 3604.
soccer tomorrow anyone? petar/thefeelgood.com
I get the gist of your idea, from your other comments, now.

People surf the internet at an incredibly rapid and random rate. It'd be more than annoying to see link after link posted by the millisecond. I'd also bet that most of the time, sites where your friends contribute are sites that will probably appeal the most to you and have some sort of value. Even if you limit to specific sites, sure that's narrowing it down, but you're narrowing it down from millions of sites to hundreds, which is still pretty inconvenient for me to follow, considering I am an extremely extremely popular person and have an innumerable amount of friends. You get the point.
Cool - thank you. I was expecting something more like, 'we are the Internet' - maybe that came later on.
[Site Name Yet to be Determined] helps you organize, track, and follow up on your search for a [job|apartment|house|car|date|employee|vendor|whatever] on the web.
You could rank URLs higher that have been browsed by more of your friends in the last 30 minutes, etc.
What SEO tool are you using?
Dev Diligence Wiki
Seems like it would apply to lots of other fields than spoken word poets-- bands/performers/speakers of any stripe could use such a tool.
That doesn't necessarily mean that those links are of more value. Say I got rickrolled, and my friend sees that in my history, and clicks through only to be rickrolled, and so forth. Next thing you know, I've ultimately rickrolled my entire social circle (I'd love that). Replace rickroll with porn and you get a worse (or better) situation. Trust in your links will wane.
I'd suggest "never optimize code without profiling" might work as a better maxim than "avoid premature optimization". Profilers are great for pointing out where you're likely to get the greatest return on investment when trying to optimize.
I met a guy at Startup School that was planning to build a universal address book that would insure people and businesses knew where to send your bills, tax forms, and how to call you, etc. He intended it to be a tool for handling permanent moves, but I think there's the same set of problems. Making it worth anything requires huge uptake and getting huge uptake without value is impossible.

Personally, I like that every time I move, my junk mail drops off for many months (the "occupant" garbage still shows up, but it's easier to toss without thinking about it). I think that's the only thing I like about moving, actually. Having a system that allowed junkmailers to know my new address automatically would be a negative value, and I think the same is true of a site that allows constant contact with folks on vacation--I like being out of reach when on vacation.
Your friends would learn to avoid certain URLs after a while. Also, the title of the web page should probably be displayed along with the URL.
Wow: "During the past 50 years, I’ve written well over a thousand programs, many of which have substantial size. I can’t think of even five of those programs that would have been enhanced noticeably by parallelism or multithreading."
I have to admit that when I first saw the title my first thought was also about the jewelry business. I guess I can blame it on brain washing from TV commercials.
I see what you're saying. My initial thoughts are that there would be serious quality control issues. For example, I know that 90% of the content I look at on a daily basis is of little interest to someone else, and probably a sizable percentage of that is not even really relevant for me.

How would the content be filtered, if at all?

I'm not knocking your idea; I'm just trying to imagine the value of such a tool.
totally offtopic but jakub the primary bug wrangler (and great maintainer) has been MIA for 3 weeks.
lol, nice to see that the community is so tight.
Anyone care to provide a really brief summary of this article?
Take me with you, nickb!
You would specify which domains/URLs you would like to broadcast. So if something is obviously of little interest to others, you might want to keep it private.

Also, as mentioned elsewhere, you could make it so that a URL would rank higher if more of your friends looked at it in the last 30 minutes, etc.
[VerbNounAdjective]: One click to read it later--a Netflix Queue for your web surfing.
Also, you could make it so that a URL is ranked higher if more time was spent checking it out.
Why don't you just put it out there and see if people like it?
You are totally begging the question. If you have somebody's name, you can "ask" the Internet about their age, sex, religion, or race. That's illegal too.

What I'm asking is, one reasonable person to another, what possible reason could you have for wanting to know the age of an applicant? It is legal to ask if a candidate can legally work full time for you. Why would you ask anything more?
Well, for a start, it's not easy for me to build since I have no idea how to build browser plugins...

There's also a privacy issue. Maybe people would not trust my implementation really does what I claim it does.
This line of reasoning seems nonsensical. There are no non-optional interview questions. But all questions asked during an interview are used to discriminate between candidates; that's the point of an interview. How do you ask a candidate what their age is without discriminating based on age? If you're not discriminating on age, why on earth would you ask the question?
I think this is brilliant, because I have a friend who was recently fired because he is basically smarter and more brilliant than anyone else in his "programming" group. We work for a Fortune 100 "technology" company in which the technical manager above him does not know a single programming language. If you can imagine how demoralizing that is. I am convinced that they got rid of him so they could outsource the actual work to India, while maintaining their cushy managerial jobs doing nothing. In the meantime, the morale of the rest of the real programming team is plummeting, and the managers are leading blindly, because they do not know how to offer real technical solutions. Talk about DUMB large companies!
I suck at elevator pitches, but here goes:

HubSpot (http://www.HubSpot.com):

On demand software for inbound marketing. Helps small businesses get more website visitors and convert a higher percentage of them to paying customers.
Just do it. What happened to the LCD numbrosia you were going to do? I was thinking about that; pretty good idea. You wouldn't even need lcd's just an array of digital bar displays.
That touch screen puzzle device was just an idea I had. It wasn't something I had the expertise to build.

In any case, I later found out that it has already been done:

http://gizmodo.com/338502/magic-cube-heralds-the-future-of-g...
I wonder if it would make sense to have a dedicated core to virtualize any processor/os in order to speed up emulation. A dedicated hardware/software translation engine.
For some reason, our brains tend to overvalue savings. I've noticed this myself with gas prices. I am willing to go out of my way to stations that charge 10-20 cents less per gallon. Is that really worth the trouble? At ten gallons, this only amounts to 1-2 dollars out of 40 total. It really isn't worth it for me, yet I feel compelled to do it.
I don't see numbrosia on those things! You can still do it. Every idea is already implemented in some form or another anyway. Team up with a hardware EE, a good undergrad could do it. You have the code already. Start her up.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=167657
http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html
Congratulations Dude, I picture you in Cancun with a margarita now, but hope you have the chance to answer: How much of your success do you think is thanks to good SEO?
Making it real-time and friend-based would make this potentially compelling, especially if you use the ranking heuristics mentioned elsewhere in this discussion.
Mapping the Distraction that is Wikipedia
If you're browser supports custom CSS files (which pretty much every browser does), you can just use the following:

a[rel~="nofollow"] {
background-color: rgba(255,0,0,0.10);
//background-color: rgb(255,0,0);//for people without rgba
}

Credit to Tom: http://tlrobinson.net/blog/?p=37
I thought the exact same thing you thought about the textbook, and I thought I would do it sort of like a professor does--start out with a set of notes that evolve into a textbook over time.

I agree with the "cut the crap" out of textbooks. I think modern textbooks spend a lot of pages showing fluff. When I look at historical books, like Hardy's A Course on Pure Mathematics, I am amazed at how concise yet rigorous they are compared with today's textbooks.