skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: Recording Video Tutorials
I currently use Camtasia Studio for recording video tutorials. However, I find that even the simplest video requires me to record at least 10 takes. I find the subtle errors and mistakes I make annoying, even when following a script. While Camtasia has some built in editing tools, it's overly obvious when a video is edited, and I feel that can be annoying to the viewer. As a result I find myself constantly reshooting to get that pefect take.

Has this been your experience? If not, what do you do differently?
Entrepreneur. Woz is a builder.

This may not be a duality with clear-cut boundaries, but nevertheless it strikes me as a very true one, one that helps me understand things. Introvert/extravert is not clear-cut either.
Fascinating. I keep hearing from a couple of people about how much effort, time, and money they are putting into their patent application process, fairly early on. One of them, a founder, supposedly has experience pitching to VCs, and claims that VCs always ask: "How is your product protected? What prevents others from copying your idea and outcompeting you?" He also claims the VCs expect to hear a simple answer "We have a dozen patents pending on our technology."

I wonder now if he doesn't know what he's talking about, or if the VCs writing these "build your product, don't worry so much about IP protection yet" are the cream of the crop who actually have a clue, but are completely out of reach for most (especially first-time) entrepreneurs.
Don't blame ABC. Blame the company.

1. The product is software, yet there appear to be no standards for source code. Imagine that happening in autos or pharmeceuticals.

2. Even if there were standards, how could they be enforced without code reviews?

3. Five years to market? The plug needed to be pulled four years ago.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were the main brains behind the Apple computer although Steve Wozniak was more nerdy, Steve Jobs also had his input. He is seen as a business or idea man today because of his charisma and flamboyance.
Oh, I thought this was going to be about Juan, Pauli, Jorge, and Ringo.
DIY 3-D Laser Scanner
I don't think it is a choice. As described, entrepreneur/builder are two distinct personality types.
That's a very good point. IMO the biggest problem with unit tests is that so many people mis-use them, believing that they are a replacement for QA, integration testing, and load testing. You need people to look at your user interfaces to validate their usability, for one thing.

When I was working with Rails, I found the unit test framework to be nearly useless for my application since it relied on a SOAP service (and at least back then, you couldn't hit the service with a unit test), but the Rails integration tests were great.

So I ended up writing a fairly extensive suite of integration tests, but nearly no unit tests at all.
I have a Landau book in my hands right now ;)
How "Why Startups Fail" Fails
The Alpha Geeks: "Geeks" inheriting the world
Another vote for Debian or Ubuntu. I've been happy with both. Debian is more stable, but if you rely on a recent package (say if you keep your software in git), you then have build or install your own or rely on backports or other unofficial packages. Ubuntu Server is more up-to-date. (It goes without saying that your Ubuntu Server installation shouldn't have any X packages installed, and, by default, does not.)

With respect to Red Hat based distributions, I have always had more luck with apt and Debian packages than RPMs. It probably comes down to familiarity, so YMMV.
I have to agree with Brian... Caching is not a purely practical concern; it is important to the analysis of algorithms as well. It looks like Knuth agrees:

http://www.softpanorama.org/Lang/c.shtml

Donald: I mentioned earlier that MMIX provides a test bed for many varieties of cache. And it’s a software-implemented machine, so we can perform experiments that will be repeatable even a hundred years from now. Certainly the next editions of Volumes 1-3 will discuss the behavior of various basic algorithms with respect to different cache parameters.

In Volume 4 so far, I count about a dozen references to cache memory and cache-friendly approaches (not to mention a "memo cache," which is a different but related idea in software).
Microsoft To Shut Live Search Books
There's plenty of open source software that resembles XP. Why not use that? Indeed, the initial version of OLPC was designed specifically to be below the specification to run XP and now Microsoft has a small team hacking up the stock version of XP so that it will run in a smaller space and with less processing power. Even then, as I understand, an XP install requires an additional 1GB memory stick. This increases price, decreases the number of children who benefit, decreases the "de-facto" aspect and allows proprietary interests to jeopardise the initiative. All this is for the benefit of cautious beaucrats who can easily find other reasons against purchase.
That's what I thought after reading the first paragraph. If anything, I find Knuth's books to among the most approachable, partially because he has a good sense of humor, but mostly because Knuth writes in a very conversational style.
Increase the level of detail in your script, chunk the script into chapters/sections, record the sections until they are perfect, and use Camtasia transitions to edit sections together.
I stand corrected.

I remember reading Volume 1 where he notes how he is not happy with current architectures, which is why he introduced MIX. I guess I wrote my earlier comment from how I look at Knuth, perhaps not how it was intended. Haven't seen Volume 4 yet though.
Is it just me, or is anyone else just not even surprised anymore when a big company treats their customers like crap.
Where's the Consistency
Why Can't App Makers Translate Facebook Success To MySpace?
nearly impossible to get smooth edits in camtasia IMO. we just do full takes in one shot (yeah it might take several attempts)
RMS Essay: Come Celebrate the Joy of Programming, with the World's Most Unbureaucratic Computers
> entrepreneurs are builders because they create something from scratch.

Yes, the two types of people aren't that far apart, but the entrepreneur is the guy that can tie things together and make things happen, whereas the builder is the one who creates a beautiful, well done product - or maybe not even that, just a brilliant idea that no one has ever done before. Perhaps "pure" builders aren't suited for startups - they're the brilliant type of people who just don't want to be bothered with organizational or marketing details, and would be happy in the R&D department of a company big enough to give them all the resources they need to create really interesting things. At least that's my mental image...

Some hackers who strike me as not wanting to deal with the business side, and have still prospered might include people like Andrew Tridgell (who is a seriously smart individual), Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, Alan Cox, and so on. Not that they don't have some good organizational skills and people skills too, but they are not the kind of people I would describe as entrepreneurs.
How do you figure it's a duplicate?

One submission points to a new technology. The next points to the relevance, timeliness, and implicit power of the Hacker News community. If you've ever tried to market something you know how hard it is to be picked up by big-name bloggers; TC has as many as 3 million viewers a month between uniques/RSS. That's tremendous exposure, and it started right here only 12 hours ago.

If that marketing message doesn't speak to you that's fine... just don't vote it up.

By the way, thanks for the credit, but I never asked for it -- not in my tip to Mike Arrington, and not in this post which follows. That's not the story, and that's why I chose not to highlight it. Anyway I credited HN (not myself) in my message... Mike pulled the TC link from my email signature.
Well, there is a near infinite amount of freeware and shareware that only runs on Windows. Why not give people access to that? I can't see any reason not to give people the option.

I guess I don't view it the same way because I'm not as anti-proprietary. The goal of the XO seems, to me, not so much to further open source software (it hardly needs the help) but to further the education of the poor. I don't see how giving them more options could not do so.
You don't have to excuse using VBA as your first language. I bet you a full third of the readers here got started with VB or VBScript of some sort. It doesn't speak poorly of anyone's skills. It just says you're willing to do the work with the tools you've got.
> The more and better you build, the less you need to wheel and deal.

I think that that is actually a common mistake for 'builder' type people. "I'll make something that kicks ass, and everything else will sort of work itself out".
Thanks for the PC. What do I do with it?
What you wrote is a very apt description of my idea of the 'entrepreneur', but it definitely isn't the "builder"/"Woz" kind of guy, so much. Maybe in the right circumstances, builders can handle that stuff (like PG in my example), but I don't think it comes as natural as it does to people who really fit into the role you describe.
Google Sites has Altered the Landscape for Wikis
"the less you need to wheel and deal" != "everything else will sort of work itself out"

Big difference
The conclusion doesn't match the story. XYZ wasn't hurt because he wrote maintainable code, but because ABC didn't. XYZ's problem was that he/she wasn't able to maintain poor code. Believe it or not, folks, that's an important skill, and something employers in the corporate/IT world pay big money for. XYZ doesn't have it. ABC may or may not, it's not clear.

But the moral here isn't that the market doesn't value good software. It's that the market places more value on the ability to make bad software work. Well, duh.
Yahoo Claims Record With PostgreSQL Petabyte Database
"Yahoo's data needs are substantial. According to Hasan, the travel industry's Sabre system handles 50 million events per day, credit card company Visa handles 120 million events a day, and the New York Stock Exchange has handled over 225 million events in a day. Yahoo, he said, handles 24 billion events a day, fully two orders of magnitude more than other non-Internet companies."
duplicate or not, its pretty great
Oh, it wasn't my first language(My grandma bought me Turbo C when I was 12) and I'm not embarrassed really(Excel + VBA is pretty good at what it does), just explaining why I used such a weird setup to write the games in. Someone might be confused about why myself and others choose to use Excel as our development environment.
Where can I find sources of finance for small business startups?
I'd just assumed it to be "I did it in Excel because I could"
Come on, most of us have had some form of logic class. It shouldn't be that hard. !(!p) = p.
Yegge at his grand best. But he didn't mention the most lively of all living software: software that gets smarter with use - i.e. makes use of using machine learning. This is the software that feels most alive to its creator and users. It grows like a dog or a child. The software Stevey talks about merely grows like a city.
Were you previously working on a scheduling algorithm?
Would it kill people to have titles that might actually have to do with the content of the article?

Proper title is: "GameStop Dumps the Zune due to Poor Demand" or somesuch. Editorialize in the comments, please. Doing so in the title makes it look like TechCrunch said that, which they certainly did not.
Microsoft's Secret Plan To Kill Google Explained.
The tone of the piece is kind of pathetic. It's people who crave more power and prestige bemoaning their status as technicians. Huge numbers of people believe all kinds of idiotic things in all sorts of unscientific domains, and this is not an interesting observation. This article only exists because between the lines they're talking about political power.

This bit cracks me up.

>Parents believe that even though doctors assure them that vaccines are safe, those doctors may be wrong. Therefore, the parents think they are entitled to throw their own judgment into the mix.

The NERVE of parents to review the literature and conclude the autism threat may be greater than the vaccine protective benefits and make their own decision. It's not like billion dollar pharmaceutical products and associated government policies have ever hurt people before!

The piece fails to even allude to the idea that scientific officialdom blew its credibility last century. A whole lot of stupid or evil policies and pronouncements that pushed people around were made under the banner of science. The laissez-faire people were almost always right.
I think the "distinct" part is what makes it false choice. "Builder" (ability to create a product personally) is good. "Entrepreneur" is good. Having either one in spades may be sufficient for success. Having some measure of both may be as well.
Almost any of them can work well. If you are a competent admin and architect, you can make any distro work. But competent admins and architects generally already know several distros very well and wouldn't get much value from this discussion. So your real problem seems to be that you're worried that you don't have the proper skill set.

Basically: you're asking the wrong question. Either develop the expertise yourself, or hire someone who already knows this stuff and trust their judgement. Asking a bunch of internet yahoos for their opinion on a platform choice is just going to cause a flamewar (c.f. bootload's post above).

All that being said: I've had plenty of experience on Ubuntu and RHEL/CentOS and like them both. Debian is rougher but works once you know it well. Stay away from Gentoo except as a teaching tool. And *BSD and Solaris are also good choices if you have the staff buy-in (i.e. don't cause friction with your IT folks, let them use what they like).
Piper: New Mac Laptops Coming
Any good developer should just work for him/herself. In reality, the good one will go to start his/her company but street sweeping.
Kannel still requires you to have a SMS provider or paired it with a modem as you mentioned. All it really does is give better control over your SMS in/outbond flow. I would recommend 41411 if you are going to server the US as well. I have used it with different applications, and still do. They have an API and you can get up and running within minutes. Best part, it is free.
Hulu - Start-Up Junkies episodes
The Decline of the English Language
The Machine is Us/ing Us
You were not misremembering. Volume 4 is in beta, and a planned rewrite of Volumes 1 to 3 (after Volume 5! eta: 2015) to take advantage of MMIX (the new version of the MIX language) is not even on the horizon yet.

http://www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html
Nobody wants microsoft's Zune, i say nobody wants microsoft, period.
recent article on techcrunch says that GameStop Dumps the Zune Because Nobody Wants It - i'm saying nobody wants microsoft, period. or at least that's where MS is going.
Greasemonkey script: Filter Reddit and Hacker News
Most countries don't have the free email gateways. I don't think there's a free way of doing this.
I totally that a product focus is a key to greatness, with a big caveat.

EVERYONE sets out to build a kickass product that are so freaking good that it flies off the shelves. Most fail, and merely build a GOOD product. Good products need sales, marketing, messaging, packaging, bizdev, etc.

And... FWIW, Apple spends a TON of money on marketing (but telemarketing, as you say, would be a bad way to market). They advertise everywhere, spend a ton on packaging, do biz dev deals all over the place, and all of the expensive Apple Stores are really just a distribution/marketing tool, no?

Andreessen told a great story about how they literally couldn't sell their business offering until the phrase "intranet" started making the rounds... Same product, different packaging/messaging, sales skyrocket.

How you talk about your product and how you position is (oftentimes) just as important as how good it is... Especially if it's just merely good.
41411 only covers the USA and that is not my target audience for now
I've heard you quickly get blocked as spam by the email gateways if you start doing this in bulk.
I think the author is talking about business method software patents. If the business method implementation needs patentable technology to implement, then it may not be such a bad idea.

But again I feel that for an early stage company, filing a patent just helps mitigate the risks in the VC's head more than anything else. Forget about enforcing your patent. If you are successful and you have a lot of money and you feel like bullying your competition, we all know how some successful companies go about it.
If you forwarded the link to TC, that's a testament to them following emailed tips, not News.YC.

It's also naive to chalk a story-meme's advance up to any one hop-path, because these things go in waves. If the concept has legs, it appears multiple places in rapid succession no matter what.

Also, TC has picked up things from News.YC before (hence the 'another' in your headline), and will again. Do we need an 'echo' story post every time? At best it's self-congratulatory fluff.

Which I brings me to the ultimate reason I didn't like this submission. I can no longer read TC directly because it's all snark, sophomoric analysis, sensationalist linkwhoring, and self-congratulatory fluff. I don't want News.YC to be thought of as a TC-feeder; I don't want hat-tips from TC to News.YC bringing more of that comment-community, hair-trigger-attention-span, and traffic-at-any-cost attitude here.

So there you have it. If it's impactful news that breaks at TC, it's still a good submission here too. If it's something we already read here, or echo-chamber navel-gazing ("look, he likes us, he really really likes us!"), it dilutes the unique value proposition of this forum.
Dude, this title amounts to FUD and to some, possibly libel. The article doesn't say that Dreamhost deleted any files - it doesn't name the hosting service in question - it merely said it had "rates like a Dreamhost".

I clicked on this because I use Dreamhost and thought it might concern me, but it doesn't, because this isn't about Dreamhost. I'm now annoyed.
I misunderstood. My mistake. I am sorry. I've deleted the submission. +1 Thanks for telling me early enough to be able to do that.
MacBook Pro: If you were Steve Job and wanted to design new MBP then what ... 
bells and whistle will you add:

Wimax

Blu-ray

built-in Final Cut pro

Extra-ordinarily thin

Longer battery life

and of course available under $1500?
We get a lot of good advice from VCs across this site; I'd like to give some back: Talk to the "staff." You will never hear about many of the problems illustrated by Tamerlin, for instance, or even the lowdown on edw519's "is the product any good?" from the CEO if the startup is in the early, rapidly evolving phase (where the product is still fluid and trying to fit the market).

The CEO will give the reports filtered through management, and a major underlying reason why startups fail is that they fail to see what (or who) is important.

Take the technical folks to lunch. If outside consultants are involved in, say, non-technical aspects (content development, design, etc.), take them also, but separately. Don't bring management. Let them talk freely and you'll get a much clearer picture of what and who is important to the company's success than you will if you only look through the CEO's eyes.
Kudos, they used a 301 redirect from old URL's to new URL's.

http://blog.merricklozano.com/post/35818832/tumblr-is-now-se...
I drank the Kool-Aid and I still like the flavor. I still practice TDD every day. And yet I agree with most of what you said.

When people get dogmatic about unit tests, they write way more than is needed to bring value. The value is: you can refactor code more easily; you can think things through a little bit at a time and let the design evolve; the code you write tends to be really simple and easy to understand; you get executable documentation of code as a side-effect. And for me, a huge benefit is that when pair-programming, the current test defines the current task.

If the unit tests are making the code harder to refactor and evolve, then it's time to write fewer of them. And if unit testing isn't fun, then something is seriously wrong.

Do people not know that when you want to just explore a wild design idea, you should abandon unit testing and just go wild?
You must not be dealing with typical tech investors if they're asking for those sorts of things. Tech investors generally don't ask precisely because they are meaningless.

The best you can do is look at your nearest competitor. Pro forma numbers work great for the guy who ran one hotel and is opening another down the road. They can justify using the same occupancy rate, etc.

Using your competitor's historic traffic data is, of course, meaningless, but to someone who is asking you for numbers that are by definiton meaningless guesses, it probably counts as justification.
Yup, unit tests are a programmer aid, not a replacement for QA. If the unit tests aren't helping you code faster (by preventing debugging), they're not worth it.

It's probably close to impossible to prevent people from using unit tests as a substitute for QA, though. The concepts are similar enough that people are bound to confuse them, or at least take the confidence they get from passing unit tests as "good enough" to substitute for QA.
If I agree will you go back to work ? Please ?
This is probably true up to a certain point - the executive ranks. The highest ranking "engineers" probably do more "business" stuff than code and are basically executives, except in name.
I've definitely been a victim of such "attacks" (though not on Twitter). The solution is to be more emotionally stable than a 5 year old and not care if someone calls you names.
The question is: How much worse would it be if they didn't have unit tests?
Yeah, I feel like he must be misunderstanding a law there. Otherwise the economic viability of much of the web goes out the window.
The Google of Europe?
Glossy displays are already available on MacBook Pros. I'd just love one with a 3ghz+ chip and I'll take one for sub $1500 ;)
LinkedIn Ettiquette
I'm having a similar problem, mainly with revenue projections with advertising.

So I'm just building out a table - each row in the table is some level of traffic, and each column has some projection of yield (yield = CTR X CPC), like reasonable worst case, probable case, and reasonable best case.

Basically, identify the variables in the model. Come up with some reasonable ranges for what those could be, put those in a table. For example, for CPC advertisements, the CTR that I have heard about range from a minimum .05% to a maximum of 30%, and the CPC ranges from $.01 to $100 (e.g. for mesothelioma related ads at one point).
Don't Send Lots of Emails After Being Rejected
Two Hidden Features Firefox 3
> Sorry, currently our video library can only be accessed from the United States.

Righhhhht. It was nice seeing you, bye.
How annoying this is: 'But the collective expertise of thousands of researchers barely registers with global warming skeptics, creationist movie producers and distrustful parents. Why is scientific authority under fire from so many corners?'

A neat trick, associating global warming scepticism with creationism! Why is it so difficult for people to understand that science proceeds via argument backed by data not by 'consensus' whatever that might be or estimations of scientists' expertise.
"Those books will never tell you ( in code ) that their could be errors, their could be failures, their could be some problem in making a connection"

There could even be wrong usage of "their" 3 times in a row in an error message!