skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
that's a huge benefit/differentiator - I'm surprised you guys didn't put it on your front page or even in the 'how it works' page
partially what's keeping me from writing a certain app I've been thinking about for a little while

Have you played with SVG?
Green puppy
Subject to shill: tech books as corporate marketing
Sorry about that. I get this a lot. The primary site (which also hosts my own personal blog) is my new startup which is an online marketplace for network TOOLs.
it didn't.
Windows XP SP3 Creates Havoc
Some believe that free will is acheived through random aspects of quantum mechanics. This is particularly attractive to people who don't understand quantum mechanics.

This man is now my personal hero.

Suddenly I understand why so many bright people were drawn to work with McCarthy. :)
In Pictures: How To Unlock Your Company's Creativity
I suppose that's true but I've been thinking of some good ways to handle karma on community focused sites.

Maybe if you can wrap something up in a product it would be a good opportunity.

Some things I've been thinking about:

- Reward the early karma givers more than the latter to avoid the pile on (maybe give each poster a karma amount equal to a function of the karma given to the same post after them). So if I am the first one to upvote something, and the post ends up with 20 karma points, I get a f(20) or f(19) karma, depending whether I want to include myself.

- Give people a daily karma limit which is based on their current karma score

- Back in my early school days when I used Word I used to like having my papers rated on the "Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level" and was always trying to get the perfect score of 12. Maybe something like that could be included but that may be overkill - probably let it be entirely user driven.

- The ultimate purpose is to keep everything balanced and make the new users feel involved without being limited too much, so a lot of these ideas may need to be tested.
On an unrelated note, is anyone else having trouble reading this because of the dark-gray on light-gray background?
Two different browsers. And at most 30 seconds. But I take your point. Before that trick I tried googling for the article itself, and all I found was the publisher offering to sell it for $14. (It would probably take months to arrive, too.) There you have the market inefficiency. I'd happily pay, but nowhere near that much, and only if I get to read it immediately.
Marston Alfred of SugarStats.com - Online diabetes management tool
The 10 Most Profitable Businesses To Start
More canvas goodness:

http://www.abrahamjoffe.com.au/ben/canvascape/
How To Get What You Want
i guess at least 5 people do care enough * 10 (if thats the percentage you expect to engage in vote) = 50 people do care

so, i was wrong!
Mind you, I didn't mean to suggest that your handy advice was not very, very welcome. :) I might even get around to trying it later.

I just wanted to register my annoyance at the state of online publishing while it was still fresh.
What is Web 3.0?
Don't you pretty much open yourself up to fraud? Instead of the seller needing to check the transactions manually and taking the risk that the person won't charge back all the money, you are the one getting the short end of the stick?
In Pictures: Nine Time-Tested Businesses That Rake It In
The world-wide "unconference" for wiki developers, users, and admins. The 2-day event is free of charge for all participants; anyone interested in wiki or related community and technology issues is welcome to attend. Schedule is decided on the spot, and all attendees are expected to be part of the peer-to-peer talk sessions.
I had a similar thought to your first point when reading this. The author is claiming that webmasters have to build two sites rather than one, thinning resources and reducing quality. This is because if Google determines one is spam, they have to fall back to the other site.

But if the sites are similar and are created for safe redundancy, I would assume the second site is going to imminently get nailed as well. I mean, the guys says build two of the same sites at different places so you have a backup. You're building two mediocre targets either hoping that the other one isn't noticed by google (which probably means users aren't finding it either) or that they're significantly different somehow.

I agree, it sounds in its lack of detail like someone doing something sketchy and complaining it doesn't work. I'm not aware of any cases in which non-specious websites have gotten nailed and had no recourse. The author didn't provide any. Has anyone seen this in the wild?
I should probably clarify that I have nothing against working on legacy systems and I agree that it is lucrative. I have something against COBOL though.
May 9-11 2008, in Palo Alto, California
Out of curiosity, what class was this?
To that, I can only reply:

Startup Y Combinator startup Lisp Paul Graham startup startup hacker startup.
Great job and congrats. I have an invite from Heroku, and the little I have used of it has been an amazing experience.

Abstracting away deploying, scaling and monitoring from the developers and allowing them to think about the problem they are working with is truly a boon.

And clients dont have to worry about managing hardware or dealing with redundancy. Love it. Now only if I could find a client who's willing to work with me on Heroku.

Congrats again, guys! You really deserve it.
Ties in nicely with:
"If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics"
I hate crap like this. This kinda format works great for the "I love PC World!" crowd but I don't think it'll pass here.
Uhhh - a buzzword that you've latched onto for linkbait?
I love, love, love articles that I have to click nine or ten times just to read 25 sentences!

THANK YOU!
In Pictures: 10 Elements Of A Sound Business Plan
Oh fuck off, ideas101. How many forbes.com "articles" can you submit?
I'm so tired of matts "facebook isn't google" rants, move on dude, we get it.

My Opinion is that facebook is one of the best valued ad networks for advertisers right now and the flood of brands is a matter of when not if.
Wish I would have read this before I even got a job.
It is doubtful your consulting shop is worth much, you are correct that the value is in the people who may or may not stay and also in the relatioships you and your people have with your clients.

I think it would be tremendously difficult sell, unless you could sign all your clients to new agreements with their understanding that you would be leaving and there would be a transition. A very difficult thing to do in my mind.
Why Apple is really more expensive than Amazon
In Over Your Head -- The Life of an Entrepreneur
Ask HN: Amazon flexible web payments?
Have any of you used the new Amazon payment system? Any experiences and pros/cons you could relate to us?

Referring to the service here, of course:
http://www.amazon.com/Flexible-Payments-Service-AWS/b?ie=UTF8&node=342430011
He doesn't really explain how "advertising works," only how search advertising, specifically works.

So the conclusion of his argument should not be that Facebook won't make money off of ads but rather that Facebook won't be able to make money in the same way Google does.

The reasons why advertising doesn't work on Facebook are more subtle than the "there's no intent" line, which was trotted out by at least a dozen people last year. Google "scoble Facebook stroller" to see.
Counting 'freshness' is even worse - that just turns the whole thing into a game of speculation. "Piling on" to existing popular consensus does enough damage to originality, but what you propose would explicitly reward a proactive chase of the lowest common denominator.

For an exploration of similar ideas, take a clicky:
http://www.nplusonemag.com/?q=node/473
(I actually think I might have seen here first, but forgotten to save it...)
In my experience it's painfully slow and advanced features are spottily supported on every implementation I've tried; is yours different?
imho I still feel LINQ is a knockoff and a really late one (years late). to MS's credit LINQ does bring a lot of improvements; mainly in shorter, more concise syntax
Cool Multi Touch Display Demo
Yep, that's because Matt's really arguing that Facebook can't make money using the same model as Google, even though the title of his post implies he'll be talking about advertising in general.

He certainly didn't explain how "advertising works," only how search advertising on Google works.
Perhaps you should've clicked through to the article and realized that I simply copied/pasted the title of his piece, instead of accusing me of using linkbait.
I had the same feeling when reading the article. Then I noticed the other two tales on the site: about nofollow and captchas both being bad for the web. That's when I knew for sure this was written by a spammer.
Double click to search on NYT.com
So anyone want to take a stab at the qualitatively different practices that separate classes of people who program computers?

(Was about to write "people who hack", but think that hacking itself is a qualitatively different way of writing computer programs than what most people do.)
only if I get to read it immediately

I'm sure Scribd has considered this model.
That's a bad definition of workaholic. I think the similarity with alcoholic is there to indicate an addiction to work. Having a boss that makes ridiculous demands (which you must complete or get fired) doesn't make one addicted to work, it just makes it a shitty job.
I thought it might be a good article, but then it ended right after the introduction where I thought the actual content of the argument would arrive.
stop it. just stop spamming the YC boards with this crap.
35 pages to get across the "deliberate practice" idea? I hate to be ever so demanding, but why are we voting this up when a much shorter article gets the entire point across?

(see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=185533 )

Daniel
This first sentence comment by itself is more informative and interesting than the entire "article" under discussion.
Not yet, I've looked at it a bit but haven't looked in to browser compatability at all.
I would love to hear anyones thoughts as well.
I would consider it "acceptable", because an adult certainly bares a certain level of responsibility for his/her actions, whereas a child is more a victim of circumstance, really.

It was just a rant, and certainly not a lecture (I include myself as part of the problem). I don't have a solution, but I can't help but put my son in the soup kitchen line with a toy truck and feel that there is anything just about that.
Steve Jobs travel update: Private jet reimbursement decreased 95% last quarter
Good enough to drool over. But I'd really want to know what he thinks about production software, not just the cute standard AI/consciousness questions. Like how to make a better faster more fiable and more customizable ERP workhorse.
That's interesting. Why do you think he's doing this? Assuming the guy isn't an idiot (and there's no reason to assume he is), why would he do this? Has he gotten enough of a payout that he wants to bail out? Or have you misunderstood the situation? Or both? Or what?

Daniel
Most hospitals in the Bay area offer "per diem" (4+ shifts a month) positions for nurses like that. The going rate is from $60-80 per hour depending on your shift, experience and position. $70/hr x 12hr shifts x 6 days = $5k gross.

But, yeah. Hospitals nation wide are chronically short of staff and California is certainly no exception. Gigs like that are fairly easy to come by if you work it right.

A lot of hospitals are willing to work with you and schedule you all in a row like that if they know you. Many nurses come to the Bay area as a contract nurses on a 3 month contract. They develop a relationship with a department or manager, and then sign on as a per diem and arrange their schedule so they work 6 shifts in a row at the end of one pay period and the beginning of the next one.

I think there will be more and more of this since there is such a disparity in pay between nursing wages in the South and wages in the Bay and in California in general. A nurse in Alabama can work their heart out for $20-25 an hour taking care of 6-8 patients at a time in the ER, while the same nurse in California will make 2-3 times that and care for no more than 4 patients at a time (state mandated staffing ratios).

Staffing ratios mean that hospitals have to maintain minimum staffing levels and if they don't they get in trouble with the state. That means that nursing salaries go up and they're willing to have nurses commute from TX, or Oregon or wherever.
All salespeople overpromise, if they could have made the sale without doing so they would have but that is not usually the case. It's your job to support the salespeople who bring in the money by making what seems impossible, possible. You are not angstrom any longer you are now "Super Angstrom" who pushes out web apps as easily as you breath.
It's "connection timed out" for me, but if it's this: http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html then it's old and damn good. Loved in on my fortunes...
Yup. 10K a month and I'd be in the Bahamas by now.
Yes coz spammers write long essasys telling people about things they consider wrong with the web.

BTW, try reading http://seodummy.blogspot.com/2007/01/acaptcha-almost-complet...
For a alternative to captchas.
You know, that's been our biggest issue - people approach the differentiators very differently depending on their experience. As a result of that, we've had a devil of a time really getting the benefit statement and the elevator pitch down pat. We'll probably go with some version of "safe and easy", but I'm all ears.
I think this article is a bad joke. It's laughable how some webmasters think that Google just have to include their spammy web into their ranking, and if not, Google is bad, and internet is bad, and they now just must build 100 other spammy webs and try to push them into search engines.
We do the standard anti-fraud stuff and have very good relationships with the credit card companies. Knock on wood, it's been a manageable problem so far.
This isn't really an answer to your question, just food for thought: Two of the most successful entrepreneur CEO's, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, both started out as specialists in engineering who eventually (it seems) realized that they weren't and would never be the best engineers. Their strengths have been in finding the best ways to apply existing technology, not inventing it or writing its code. So, they slid into leadership roles by finding the best engineers who weren't necessarily interested in management (Steve Wozniak is a great example) and giving them room to be brilliant.

Meanwhile, someone like Richard Branson has never been a specialist in anything specific to his businesses. He's basically a professional manager who has a crazy ability to find and retain the best people in various fields. His original strength (according to his book) was that he was willing to do anything to succeed, including bluffing, lying, and (on one occasion) breaking the law. (Most of that was ultimately harmless, except the last part!)

He also works really, really hard.

I've worked with people in various leadership positions and seen all sorts of examples. I've seen a well-paid manager of a programming team voluntarily step down from his leadership position because he wasn't comfortable telling people what to do. I've worked for a well-known duo in the game industry where the charismatic designer became the manager and the programmer had no interest in doing so (with a team of 30 while I was at the company, probably 40 now).

So maybe the specialist/generalist question doesn't matter as much as your mindset. Successful people work hard, seek out information, and are willing to take risks. Some CEO's are more respected for their abilities than liked for their personalities, but obviously if you're just putting a team together and not starting from scratch you've got no room to be unlikable.

Whew, long rant.
Ok, here is a real world example.

I own www.42topics.com. I am investing six months to build this site. This is hosted at webfaction.com. Now suppose there are a few spam sites hosted at webfaction.com, at my IP. Tomorrow Google decides that they are going to do IP based filtering, on spam sites, and my site is toast. I lose significant trafic, and my only source of Income.

Compare this scenario to Joe Spammer, who has hundered borderline spam sites. Tomorrow Google decides that 10 are spam and torches them. He creates 10 new sites, and is back on track. Guess who is hurt more by constantly changing guidelines?
Def getting some karma for that, glad to hear of good being done.
If only we knew more about how Spinoza made those lenses.
I think all they really need is something like facebook answers, I believe that can be more focused than a search on google/yahoo/msn.

Cause then, they [facebook] are armed with Demographic info, and 50% of the time, a deeper level of focus.
i guess you have the benefit of low value transactions. If you were letting users sell electronics etc, the scammers would come out of the woodwork,
I couldn't get this from google books, but I was able to read it through JSTOR. I think my institution is providing this access, but perhaps someone else has it too...

http://www.jstor.org/stable/202063
Interesting. How do you power one of these things? And how is it ventilated?
A few ideas:

* Learn how to use their tools effectively

* Aggressively simplify

* Understand math

* Understand fundamental computer science principles
The author clearly does not know what "ajax" is. It may be a misnomer and a buzzword, but what it means is something substantial.

This article is so, so bad.
I'll know more come Monday when our CEO gets back from a meeting.

He didn't want to explain things over email...which is probably a good sign that whatever he has to say needs to be fluffed in order to sound right. I honestly think that if you can't make your argument in text, you can't make your argument. We'll see.
Scatterplots are too dense!
I think someone just went through and docked everyone's karma, just for saying they like Heroku. Umm.. WTF?
Ten Years of Havok
One could write a series of books on this.

Using functional programming techniques, using macros, writing DSL's come to mind first.

More generally, trying to do what PG is doing with Arc - writing code that does the most using the least number of "thoughts", abstracting patterns as much as possible, the DRY principle, etc.
Enough Forbes articles already!

...I never knew Steve Martin went into insurance.
Ask YC: How do you maintain motivation in face of boredom?
I left my job around 3 months ago to start a startup (Single founder). Built staging.dashbard.com , www.42topics.com . Now I need to market www.42topics.com , but 3 months working alone has left me bored out of my mind! I am reasonably social (Well for a geek!), but working alone is just getting on my nerves! And as long as I was coding, I was happy. But now i find marketing this unsatisfying and boring. Did I say boring enough times? What do I do?
http://www.sun.com/products/sunmd/s20/specifications.jsp

Nice big power outlet, and don't forget to hook it up to the water as well. I'm guessing it is water cooled.
Progress on Prediction Markets
A knockoff of what exactly?
nevermind, you mention the professor and you're a freshman, so i assume it's cs21n.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121175
Picture speaks 1000 words - for the readers who dont like it can click on "Read the full story" link on the same webpage - for example for this article you may click the link and goto:

http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/29/raise-downturn-interview-le...
To answer the question you first need to define AJAX. What's your own definition, and why do you consider that convoluted and combersome?
Multiple regexes sounds fine. When you discover a new kind of duplicate, add a new regex.
Interesting that online media companies have been employing prediction markets for years, and some Internet startups have been formed around this concept. Of course, the ones I've seen are sensitive to existing regulations. Check out The Industry Standard and the Hollywood Stock Exchange for examples of prediction market implementations:

http://www.hsx.com/
http://www.thestandard.com/predictions
I know what you mean. I am a single founder for half of my projects, and for the other half I'm the sole coder in a virtual office. In both cases, the situation is the same: I'm coding by myself in my house.

One solution I've found for the boredom is to switch between projects when you get bored, or work on different (non-boring) aspects of the same project.

Another is to just get out of the house. I usually go out for lunch. And I've been trying to go to local startup events, including a monthly hackathon I created for that very purpose.

A third is of course to get a face to face co-founder (at least for some of the time), or to move your working environment to a shared space with other startups. I haven't taken the latter step mainly because I live pretty far from startup central in Philly and I don't want to pay for office space.
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive#t...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958

http://searchyc.com/flexible+payment
Q. Can computers know?

A. This is largely a question of definition. If a camera
looked at a table, we could say it "knows" that there are
four containers of liquid on the table (which was true).

This is definitely a very old school approach to AI and one that I don't find very convincing. If a computer with a camera is looking at a table with four containers of liquid, to say that it "knows" "there are four containers of liquid on the table" presupposes that it "knows" what a "container" is, what a "liquid" is, and what a "table" is, and that it can recognize and point out each of these things in its 640x480 grid of RGB values and describe the essential properties of a container, a liquid, and a table. Even that presupposes that things like "container", "liquid" and "table" have "essential properties".

(That's an interesting question: what makes a table a table? Not all tables are made out of the same material or have the same color. Not all tables have four legs (or legs at all!) and not all have a flat surface. Not all tables are the same height or width or are used for the same purposes. What, then, makes some particular table "a table"?)

We don't say that a camera "knows" there's three glasses of water on the table when it takes a picture any more than we say a newborn baby "knows" when he looks at a chessboard that Kasparov has a mate in three.

I guess I shouldn't take McCarthy's comments at a freshman seminar as representative of his most thorough theories on AI, but I found that one answer particularly naive.
Can't Touch This: Jeff Han and his multi-touch displays
We don't know that either. For example, the old-world analogues of Google are the classified ad section and the yellow pages. Both of them cater to people who know what they're looking for, and so have excellent focus. Yet I'd imagine that many, many times more money gets spent on TV commercials than on classified ads. It seems like "creating demand" is a much bigger market than "meeting demand", and if FaceBook can succeed at the former, it could be many times bigger than Google.
The article complains about overuse, overuse is the opposite to "on the way out", so "No" is the correct answer to the question in the title.

Your first point is more interesting to me though. You say that he is "passionate" and therefore not "objective", to imply that we shouldn't listen to him. That idea worries me. I want to hear from people who are passionate, who care about what they are talking about. Thought experiment: if "only ambivalent people may have an opinion" and ambivalent people can't be bothered to have opinions, how many opinions will we be left with?