skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My guess would be that (many, most) manhole covers are round because it is the obvious shape for most lids. There are so many poorly designed urban objects that I tend to believe that the feature of not falling into the hole was a lucky accident.

Think of stop signs, for example. It would be really easy to have a different shape/color for four-way stops, but at least in the US all they do is add "four way" to the sign in an inconsistent way.
I think it must get harder to run a company that way when you get a lot more employees. Once you become just another face in the crowd, there's not as much social pressure on you. The system might break down there.

I mean, I'd love to work in a place like that. And I'm sure lots of others would. After all, many of us are altruistic and hard-working people, which would work great in a culture like that.
So why are round shields better?
"But sometimes you see entrepreneurs targeting really small niches where their user base is also not willing to pay a lot for their product.

To escape this pitfall, you can broaden your user base by making your product useful to more potential users. You can also try to make your product higher value"

I'd like to generalize this advice:

"If your problem is x and y, then try to shoot for ^x and ^y."
First Look at The Gimp 2.5
the piece here reminds me of an article about entrepreneurship and overconfidence. (see http://icf.som.yale.edu/pdf/overconfidence.pdf, i think). the paper writes that the most common trait among entrepreneurs is overconfidence under a kind of evolutionary understanding. paul graham writes similarly but from a different perspective when he writes about the power of the marginal (eponymous article, i think). outsiders have the naivate to understand why something novel will work, where as insiders are well-versed in the rationalizations for the status quo. i think it's the same naivate that gives outsiders that overconfidence to pursue ventures that insiders "know" will fail.
The Economist: The Great American Slowdown
...Apple's will be nicer in design, fit, and finish...

I'm a little mystified when I read this stuff. On my new iMac, both the keyboard and mouse are very unimpressive. Although I'll admit that the keyboard looks nice and the little mouse scroll ball is clever, neither the keyboard nor the mouse is comfortable to use.

The pretty aluminum monitor/box stand only allows up/down pivoting - where's my height and side-to-side swivel adjustment?

Based on my experience with the hardware (i.e., mouse and keyboard need to be immediately replaced due to bad design and monitor would be if it were practical), I conclude that the premium is almost entirely based on the software.

And I also was very disappointed that it is basically impossible to use iPhoto to conveniently access photos on a NAS drive.
When there aren't enough of them and/or they don't want it enough.
My guess would be if someone swings a sword at you in a downward fashion it would slide or deflect off a round shield whereas it might just pull you down/knock the shield out of your arm if it hit the top of a square shield.
I've been working on an exokernel off and on for a few years now (haven't gotten very far...school and other projects keep interrupting) in C++.

Want to get to know your toolchain? Write a kernel in C++.
It sounds to me like evidence that the language needs a good macro system to help make the tests less verbose.
I second this. I have this option turned on in reddit, and it keeps me from accidentally navigating away from reddit. I keep clicking on links here and by the time I read the article, I forget to press back instead of close, causing some frustration.
GIT branch in your bash prompt []
I didn't have a single brain teaser in my msft interviews!

I was almost disappointed because I am usually quite good at them.
The Roots of Lisp
Talk by Jim Weirich on the foundations of Lisp.
Too complex.

Try this one instead. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=163168
Simpler: PS1='\w$(git branch &>/dev/null; if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then echo "($(git branch | grep '^' |sed s/\\ //))"; fi)\$ '
I think they are round because circular shape is the only shape that cannot fall into itself.

If manholes are square or any other shape... at certain angles the cover could always fall into the hole
Careful, he's root!
This has appeared in more than one place and this is definitely not the earliest reference, but the first result on Google.

http://www.google.com/search?q=git+branch+bash+prompt
My tests are about 4 times more verbose in comments than my code. Why? Because I do random crazy things that don't make sense in order to do negative testing.

Evidence of anecdotal evidence that really doesn't mean much?
Donald Knuth's letter about teaching O notation in calculus classes
I found it to be so, yes.

What see on news.yc is black text over a beige background (except for posts' metadata, which is grey over beige).
You can make a cover of any shape you want that won't fall in. It depends on how much the cover overlaps the hole. Even with a round cover, you can't have zero overlap or else the cover would fall in.

Now back to the correct answer, which is because the manholes are round - that begs the question of why manholes are round. It's probably a matter of equally distributing the sideways forces from the dirt plus a matter of being able to manufacture round tubes more easily than, say, square tubes or hexagonal tubes.
The Surprising Right Fit for Software Testing (75% of them have Asperger's)
Tips on how to work smarter from Ricardo Semler
EMusic passes 200 million downloads
Is Google actually producing?
I find it funny how Apple is quick to prevent stuff like this when it occurs yet promotes Bootcamp and uses the point that we can run Windows on our Mac if we want to. If OS X is so great, why not let anyone run OS X on any computer they wish to?

This isn't a jab at Apple, by the way -- I've been using a MBP for about two years now as my only machine and love it.
... for lack of a better term 'humbleness' perhaps ?
Twitter’s Branding Problem
Is it really cathartic to get a secret off your chest?
Another one of those "sharing secrets" sites. Don't know if there is any benefit to really sharing secrets, but people seem to want to.
Corners don't get caught on crap and slashes are deflected tangentially around the circumference rather than cleaving the shield itself.
Interview with reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian
When was your interview? In another thread, somebody said that msft had mostly given up on this practice.
Ask YC: Who do you use to print your business cards?
I'm at the stage where I need to start getting business cards printed and am wondering whether it's better to go with a small online shop (which one) or a bigger company like Staples.

Anyone have any opinions?

Thanks!
(What's with all the downvoting of a comment that... while it might not really add anything, certainly isn't blatantly offensive or a troll ?)
Lisp as Blub
Good god, I'm dumber for having read that.

(Why is the cover the same shape as the hole? Because otherwise it's a pretty shitty cover (i.e. gaps are bad))

It's astounding to me that people still care about these artifacts of another era where people fawned over whichever corporate master they sought to please. Good riddance to that, and if PG had never done anything else, he'd still be able to point to that genius ad with "Larry and Sergey won't respect you in the morning" and remain a hero.
Django Dash: 48 Hour App Competition
Ask YC: Part-time consulting while working on a startup, good idea?
My business partner and I have been working on our startup for sometime now. We do not have funding yet and have been bootstrapping it. I work full-time as a technical architecture consultant, while my business partner is 1 day a week on his job and rest on the startup.

I made a decision to quit my current contract and go full-time on my startup so that we can get it to market fast. Once I notified my client, I was offered an option to work 10 hours per week on the current project and have the rest of the time for my startup.

What are the pros/cons of doing or not doing this? Is this advisable? Should I just put 100% on startup for 3 months?

Thanks for all opinions/advice in advance.
If they weren't round, superheros couldn't use them as frisbees/weapons.

If a car hits them and they bounce and spin, they will still (most likely) settle back into the hole correctly. Even a Reuleaux polygon won't always do that.

There are no points more highly stressed than others. Put an extreme amount of weight on them and the force is evenly distributed around the circumference, rather than overly stressing the corners and bending the cover (on a square lid).
make a win-win situation, save enough and leave your current company gracefully enough to come back. Think about the cost then multiply 3x to get what you need to save, then head out and give it a shot..
Not if you can help it, unless the consulting directly feeds into your product. I find it's better, mentally, to focus on something 100%, rather than worrying about both your product and your clients problems, unless the latter is really something you can do on autopilot.
Too bad the Feynman story is completely made up. It seemed pretty realistic.

I don't get the bit about the marketing department, though. How does cutting through bullshit constitute an immediate qualification for marketing? The story would make more sense if he were hired immediately for the technical job. But that wouldn't be much of a punch line.

Edit: I was going to say that MS would never have interviewed Feynman, they would have hired him immediately. But actually the anecdote is quite good in this respect. Feynman would have insisted on going through the standard hiring process.
with no monetary numbers announced, I'm thinking it was a neutral exit with few millionaires produced. Good luck with future endeavors to both PF and LU
Definitively it is back... again and again :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=159853
He's reading too much into this. At loads this low, it can't be a language design issue. There's probably just a bug in Mzscheme.

Hard to say whether this post is deliberate linkbait or just overeagerness to see this as evidence confirming a pre-existing bias. Probably a little of both.
Semco have over a thousand employees. I think in such a large organisation, it's a great system, because everyone is accountable. I think that the opposite of becoming another face in the crowd happens under Semler's system. You answer to those around you, rather then those ten floors up.
This looks pretty cool. It's a shame we'll never be able to use it due concerns over HIPAA privacy regulations.
The Secret of Open-Source Project Success
Two little stories:
A friend of mine has been trying since 10 years to transform his consulting company into a product company - without success. The projects he has implemented were too expensive in terms of development and maintenance to have enough time apart. And none of the projects was general enough to produce a code-base that could serve as a product for several customers.
Another friend implemented a little access-based niche-domain tool during an internship for a big enterprise that he was able to resell to several competitors and even several times within the same enterprise. He is working around 5 hours per week and makes a confort living.
Honestly, I think the first story gives the more likely scenario.
The way the article describes it it's basically made available as a linux block storage device - you could set up software raid or access it as a raw device without a filesystem. Very nifty. I wonder how it plays with ZFS.
Google and Salesforce.com: Why don’t they merge?
I vote they open-source it!
Random Bots Crack CAPTCHA to Hack Hotmail
Interesting point about having a process-oriented architecture where each process has its own independent GC, but boy-o-boy is the title a troll-tastic piece of link-bait.
Is Cloud computing too good to be true?
We went with Dallas Cardworks and used a design similar to this:

http://www.dallascardworks.com/assets/images/products/busine...

Another shop whose work I like is Eddens Letterpress (http://eddens.com/). They do very high quality work.
Obviously. But in a software company, specially a startup, if you don't have good people you were doomed before you started.

On the other hand, the whole democracy thing and the employees having stake on the company may even take care of or at least counter balance having bad people.
"If your product is truly disruptive you shouldn't have to do much at all to advertise it" - this is a the exception - in almost all case you have to so a lot to get the word out - it does not have to be traditional advertising but reaching your audience requires continues effort.
8 Tips For Landing The Perfect Startup Job
It won't be a cover unless it's slightly larger than the hole wouldn't it? :)
seems time to exit to a opensource - non profit .. and find a new niche` - having an opensource helpful project on your resume` can't hurt your next job or startup.
Thank you. I've been meaning to read something by him but haven't put any thought into which book I should start with. I care mostly that it goes into detail about implementing what he preaches and keeps the pontificating to a minimum.
It's sort of linkbait, and it'd be more interesting if he had something more substantive to say... however, Erlang certainly is adept at being a robust, stable server, and has had a lot of time and brain power poured into those efforts, so I think they have a right to be proud. It'd be better to find another way of saying it, though.
Seth says: how to really make friends and influence people online
Gender bias much?
I think having multiple shapes for stop signs would be a terrible idea. The red octagon is an international standard. Messing with it is just asking for trouble. The "4-way" signs are just an aid to drivers, to indicate what behavior they can expect from other drivers. They're not required, and no replacement for plain old good judgment.
Oops, I missed that!
focus on an ultra specific niche
(facebook: harvard students | YCNews: young Hacker/entreps | ebay: beenie baby+antique sellers and collectors) build a service for that niche that the people love - until you've got that done focusing on the mass audience is too hard / too expensive. This is not easy, I have not done it, but thats what has worked.
clustering != classification

- classification (also known as categorization) - you have a set of categories into which you expect your documents to be assigned to (the documents will be matched with the existing categories)

- clustering - you expect the algorithm to give you a set of categories (the ML algorithms will find similarities between the several documents and will group them accordingly)
Tangent: In your troubleshooting, have you already made sure you aren't occasionally receiving a malformed request that is causing the server to puke? In other server software that has displayed that sort of behavior, I've seen that be the problem more often than a traffic issue. I mean; you would have noticed a memory leak type of situation by now, I'd imagine.
Conversations like this without being able to see the code have about as much relevance as talking about total lines of code as it relates to the average carrying capacity of a swallow.
Hm. In some ways, I agree. I use an iMac from 2005 as my main computer, and I don't use the Mighty Mouse that came with it. I, too, would like height adjustment on the iMac panel, but side to side seems inherent in how light it is: even my cat can spin the whole iMac around by brushing against it.

I haven't had any problems with the keyboard, and I've grown very used to its idiosyncrasies, like the always-on numpad, etc.

Eh. Enough rambling. :)
I think the idea is to have small units instead of one large bureaucratic tree or similar structure. That way each unit can exert the necessary social pressure. Like Hates_ 13 says, semco is pretty large and it grew and continues to run efficiently this way.

On the other hand, maybe as the company scales (say to the size of GM) what you end up with is a tree of "units" because something or someone has to coordinate the effort so that the company stays on track. At ~1000 employees this it is probably just higher management (e.g., Semler and his team) and the aforementioned units. However, at larger sizes there is probably too many units for a single management team to coordinate, so you start having "management units" and then "management management units" and obviously this goes nowhere logarithmically :)

So you are probably right, but there is plenty of room at the top.
It's a decision you have to make depending on your finances.

If you can work for 3 months on the startup without feeling any financial burden I'd go with that but if these 10 hours of work a week translate into a good chunk of money it may be worthwhile to do it.

A few questions to ask yourself:

1. Could the 3 months potentially turn into more?

2. Can you set the hours you will be working to accrue the 10 hours or will the client be calling you whenever they have issues? The first scenario is more preferable.

3. If you do the 10 hour option you can try to do it the same day as your partner so then you have more time together.

Just my thoughts..
I believe the keywords here (heh) are Text Mining. You should look at it (I'm doing my final project on this field).

There are a lot of things to have in mind when trying to do document classification with keywords. Document preprocessing, keyword weighting and much more.

Someone mentioned Latent Semantic Indexing, it's worth a look, but if you're just starting, you should look at the big picture.
According to interviews the Reddits have given, they (& friends & fellow YC founders) basically submitted everything themselves for the first 2-3 months. Any time they ran across something interesting on the net, they threw it on Reddit.

I remember checking it out the day it launched and leaving because it wasn't very interesting. I came back in October (about 3-4 months later) and it had some minimal traction. IMHO, the critical factor was that they added comments and people had started commenting on links.

Facebook was pretty well-established when I joined (fall 04, about 8 months after it started). People were using it as an address book - meet someone at a party, you instantly had all their contact info once you knew their name. And since there were pictures and it was organized by college, you could often pick out who they were from first names alone. There weren't many social features back then; IIRC, it just had Poke and the Wall.
2006 I believe.
I don't get it. The "blub" quality refers to expressiveness, not the robustness of the runtime system or suitability for particular kinds of application development.

To say that Arc is not concerned with brevity or expressiveness is simply ridiculous.

For the record, I think the way Erlang supports functional programming isn't particularly elegant and I think having Prolog-like syntax without Prolog-like semantics is silly.
48hourprint.com has some pretty great stuff, and great customer service, too.
I can only think of two good reasons to do consulting while you're working on your startup:

1) You don't have enough money to survive without the income from consulting.
2) Your consulting gig will help with sales in your startup (specifically, you think the company you're consulting for will buy your product once it is built).

Even if reasons 1 and/or 2 are at play, it still is a distraction. I do consulting for reason 1, but I plan to outmode that with an upcoming angel round. I am not doing all that much consulting these days anyway, but I still feel like it is a hindrance. See a semi-recent blog post about it here:

http://blog.jabbik.com/2008/03/momentum.html
Q1) Do you have the resources to survive if it takes 6 to 8 months instead of 3 months? Being done with a product in month 3 doesn't mean sales will start rolling on month 3, day 1. Think revenue date, not launch date.

Q2) Do you have the mental self-discipline to focus on one thing at time... even when you have two things on your plate or are you more productive when you only have one thing on your plate?

Q3) Have you started talking with your future customers yet? If not, talk to them first. Confirm they need what you're building. Do they need it bad and now? Assumptions can hurt.
Globbing with Finder
TweetLater : Blog when I'm alive and tweet when I'm dead
Easy way to get karma: submit The Economist articles.
It's a little like complaining that the Olympics are completely stupid and irrelevant because in reality I never need to pole-vault

I don't see that at all. It's more like complaining that pole-vaulting would be a stupid and irrelevant way to screen, say, firefighters. Which indeed it would. And that has nothing to do with calling the Olympics themselves irrelevant.
Startup idea: high-volume email client
Reference: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144127

The more I think about this, the more I think it's a huge opportunity. I suspect there are a lot of people who are overwhelmed by the amount of email they receive, and even more who could spend a lot less time on it with a little help from their software. I suspect a few news.yc readers fall in to one of those categories. What would make things easier for you? Here are a few of my ideas:

The fundamental problem is prioritization, preferably with a minimal amount of user intervention. Who the mail is from matters, of course. What it's about may matter more. For certain types of mail, the quality of the content matters, but not for others.

I'm envisioning a system built around a probability-based text classifier. Messages could be tagged with multiple categories. Categories would get an importance weight assigned based on user behavior (time between receipt and reading, likleyhood of reply, link click or other action) with an option to manually alter the weight. Some sort of autogenerated search folders would probably be useful too, but I haven't thought about the details yet.

Is anybody else working on this?
Pretty much. You essentially get your persistent read-write /var filesystem. You can keep the read-only parts of your system in your boot image. Unix has a long heritage of working in such an environment. It's a natural fit.
We'll have more constructive comments when you show us you've made some progress in terms of development.
I used gotprint.net. They came out really nicely and were cheaper than overnightprints but more expensive than vistaprints (but better quality than vistaprints).
There are two big questions about this downturn for America and the world: how long? And how deep?

Funny, the moment I read it, I checked the publication date of the article thinking it would be from 2001/2002.
http://www.overnightprints.com

Used them for years. Fantastic quality, inexpensive.
10 hours per week is not that much, stick with the current project, plus, its good to have some cash flow for ramen :-).
Puzzle:  Determining the number of one hat
Vistaprint is the total nuts. They used to give you some free cheapo ones too.
Hmm, extrapolating from the article, I guess I should get some credit for reddit's success because of my involvement with digg. Where's my cut? ;-)

Seriously though I regret not meeting the reddit guys. I felt a certain kinship with them during the crazy days of 2005. Now I'm just jealous of their exit.