skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like reading stuff like this. It's nice to think that it doesn't take greed, or any kind of significant focus on the bottom line, to outperform everyone else. Otherwise, life seems pretty tiresome.

Now, if someone created a most awesome computer game that wasn't a complete waste of time I'd be a happy person.
So it's not as popular and less supported?
This was on HN about a week ago.
Agreed, it is also more cost effective to work from home.

And at home you have a fully stocked fridge, comfy chair, and nobody will kick you out when you are hacking away at 2am.
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Ask YC: 4th Roommate in Silicon Valley in Startup House
so, not using hackernews as a psuedo craigslist, but tons of us are often making the journey out to the valley. We're a group of 3 startuppers looking for a 4th roommate sometime in early May. Email:

jason [at] publictivity.com
I find walks work well for me, gives me a chance to clear my head and the increased blood flow can't hurt.
> If you're getting a kick out of languages, have at it, especially if you've got plenty of time.

Plenty of time? No, not the school I go to. What I do have is the syslab, which is full of Linux boxen and a lot of smart people, especially during lunch. Attached to the syslab is a small library (formerly storage closet) of programming-related books, which contains, among other things, multiple copies of ANSI Common Lisp by Paul Graham.

It's a fun high school.
Recession! Abandon Your Startup/Plan?
You're paying too much attention to the posting. It just creates things to be sorted and changes arbitrary ascii characters next to my name.
all comes down to if you can convince them. the founder of siebel systems got the first 20 employees to work for free initially.
I love Ritual -- and the fine folks that work there (behind the counter) -- but the preponderance of nerds-with-macs has definitely changed the vibe of the place over the years for the worse.

My coworking space costs a little over $200/mo for 24/7 access, and it's less than 2 blocks from Ritual. Anyone spending $3/day on a latte can surely upgrade to a real workspace, and leave the cafes for meetings and -- just maybe -- people who just want to relax and have a cup of coffee without having to fight for elbow space with Rails hackers.
Source: Google To Launch BigTable As Web Service
If what you working is interesting, if you are giving good and fair amount of equity (i.e. as a starting founder).

If you looking for an "employee", without willing to pay, then good luck finding a sucker.
You need to have something really compelling - a product that really excites people and/or a high liklihood of success in the near future.

I know someone who is about to start some sw development work for a local startup for equity. The company is getting ready to sell their first product, and he told me that his plan is to try working for them for eight weeks and see if they can actually sell their product. If not, he's planning to quit. He's been totally up-front about this with the founders and they're ok with that. So a creative strategy like that might work.
I like it! Nice job, Idoh.
“Free” is Killing Us—Blame The VCs · Silicon Alley Insider
Already been posted.
Wait a minute, how did this double post happen? I didn't mean to do that! Sorry!
that's a very technical way of looking at it. i'm not only talking about how a site works in a particular browser but if it's actually good or not.

mainly the sites i have in my mind are sites where you don't choose the service based on the web-service and you end up with a really sucky service that you can't leave. for example:
- banks
- utilites companies
- cellphone carriers
- government sites
- ecommerce sites (where you're a customer in the physical store)

etc
I guess it wasn't obvious that I wasn't really seriously waiting for Google to start slinging wafers.
224 mbps for $1.58 per month
Some Heroes
Digg has different value to different demographics. For the advertisers and business persons, it is valuable in proportion to the size of the community. To those within the community, it is valuable inversly proportional to the size of the community - unless you're in part of the community that likes videos of small children hitting grown men in the genitals with baseball bats.

The problem isn't that the community is valueless - it's that it is very difficult to monetize other people's contributions.
"Now, if someone created a most awesome computer game that wasn't a complete waste of time I'd be a happy person."

Try programming. It's a very nice open-ended computer game. The depth of gameplay is just unbelievable. And there are challenges for people of all skill levels.
did you have to restore your backup? That's the big test if something actually works well.
Why home ownership causes unemployment
I think in part because the ad agencies want to overspend the money because of commissions.With the cheap (and effective) costs of internet ads, they would soon be gone.
I would just have people just be able to log what sites don't work, and automate that browser checking.

Less data entry, more responses.
Dan Bricklin: From VisiCalc to WikiCalc [video]
People who work without pay for equity at the beginning of the company are founders. See: every other post on YC about "how to recruit cofounders".

The risks involved in seed-stage, pre-revenue private company shares are spectacular. Management can and usually will drastically reduce the value of early shares throughout the life of the company. That risk is over and above the fact that your company will, like all startups, likely fail.

You didn't say this, but let's assume you're talking about developers: they bill $100/hr. You're trying to sell them shares for "maybe as little as" $1000 a week. The answer to that problem is: "give them a lot of shares".

The easier answer, which will work better than equity, is to open source.
This guy has achieved some kind of zen - true to himself in a very innate way - its great!
Lawsuit Claim: Students' Lecture Notes Infringe on Professor's Copyright
Advanced JavaScript Debugging Techniques
"I used to read a lot of novels when I was younger. I can't read most anymore, because they don't have enough information in them."

This is a good one to add to the list of things not to say on a first date. And if it does somehow come up, at least have enough sense not to follow it with "I also don't read biographies/memoirs because I consider them fiction."

/Don't ask
Yeah, this doesn't work-- more trouble than it's worth. Co-founders are better. Or get a loan. Or funding.
Can you convince them you're going to make money? Cause that's what makes those shares worth more than the paper they're printed on.
Although you may be partially right in this case, I think that people take on this corporate-hating mentality too often (against Google, against Sun, against Microsoft even!). Give credit where it's due - it's a pretty impressive thing for a company to let its employee's spend 20% of their time on their own interests, and then pay them for it.
Kevin Garnett plays exactly the same way that you describe Jack Lambert. He goes only one speed: full blast. Whenever I need motiviation, I find myself asking myself, wwkgd?
Michio Kaku on types of impossibility
Yeah, finding those naive people can be tough. Here's one, but it might be hard to get him to do it again:

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/12/is-there-more-to-li...
One of my heroes: O Sensei, Morihei Ueshiba. He definitely cared excessively about his "work", and was absolutely honest. He invented aikido, the "art of peace", whose broad purpose is to "make human beings one family."

Here's a decent video of him: http://youtube.com/watch?v=0XTlWDOQBno&feature=related
you need to do even more legwork to prove out the business model and plan than you would for a company like YC.

i'd be willing to do work for shares if i believed in the model. hell, i AM working on a startup with someone i didn't know beforehand because i personally believe that the project will become extremely profitable.
A prototype works wonders. We've actually had a couple friends that were interested in getting in on things after they saw in non-vapory-ways where we were going. The way that I got my cofounder on board was to draft a presentation for potential investors and to present it to him. Two days later he was in.
Python? Why?

Also, I thought most of Justin.tv was built on rails?
My favorite Jack Lambert story:

1977 Pro Bowl. AFC defense - 8 Pittsburgh Steelers and 3 players from other teams on the field at the same time. Jack Lambert, the middle linebacker and captain, was calling out defensive signals using the Steelers' proprietary lingo. One of the other players asked, "What should we do?" Lambert replied, "Stay out of our way."

Second favorite Jack Lambert story:

When accused by a referee of biting another player in the finger, Lambert said, "I didn't bite his finger and I can prove it." "How?" the referee asked. "He's still got it, doesn't he?"

One of the best teams ever with one of the best players ever. And no one "danced" after making a great play. They just did a great job and acted as if they had done that job before and intended to do it again. Man, how I miss that. Thanks for the memories, pg.
Fun to read.

I recently found this quote from a contemporary author:

“Jane Austen writes about people with desperately restricted
lives codified by iron rules. The first thing she does is to
choose a genre, the romantic novel, which is exactly the kind
of book those women would read if they were reading books.”

That illustrates to me a unique approach, where even the genre of the work itself serves the overall message and theme of the work.

And let me put in a word for Walt Disney, who I totally dismissed until I read about him. The parallels between his personality and that of Steve Jobs are fascinating.
RIAA to help enforcing the GPL?
Where in Pittsburgh did you grow up, PG?
The person that wrote this may or may not know what they are talking about. But the FSF (creator's of the GPL) are assisting defendants against the RIAA.

https://www.fsf.org/associate/riaa for info on that.

and the slashdot posting on it a while back

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/19/1948244
Thats actually not true. Not everyone wants money. My gf works for a startup (online picture editing site) and she currently only works for shares and no pay. I think many college students would be willing to work for shares. Especially if you have a decent startup and viable idea.
At what point do "Justin.tv is hiring" articles become spam? I've seen at least 3 or 4 of these.
No matter what you don't want to hire someone who would take a bad deal. So you should make sure you aren't offering one. So, suckers are ruled out.
Another list: Gary Gordon, Randy Shughart, the Finnish anti-armor teams in the mostly-forgotten Winter War against the Soviets (> 80% casualties), and the 300 Spartans who held off the Persians at Thermopylae.
never... at least there aren't Adsense banners on the side here.
I love how he basically repeats his YC advice for his non-YC advice. He makes the point very well.
yes. Maybe we will release the interpreter part open source., but it is not done yet. Basically a J2ME and C++ (for brew and palm), interpreter for lua.
The whole idea, is that you can build an app once in Lua, and run it everywhere (for reals). This is a company thing, (we are not a small startup), so I am not sure how much of it will be realeased open source.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q...
The first business career guide in manga form
From my limited understanding of art interpretation, in earlier times art was seen somewhat as an attempt to understand or mimic the world around them in order to understand it better. Now we tend to value creativity as a more important quality, but in doing so we sacrifice a degree of sincerity or even nobility that curiosity and mimicry have. All of these heroes share a creative quality, but in a more classical sense. They are true to themselves and their art, but they probably intuited that their art is as much or more about discovery than anything else. Maybe that's the key to making the leap from artistic commoner to greatness...

I've totally been looking for a good intro to art history recently (my friend's textbook just doesn't look that appealing...), so thanks for the recommendation! Anyone recommend a good starting point for diving into Wodehouse too? :)
A $9,000 bargain TV
Ask YC: Who are YOUR heroes?
I was so inspired by pg's essay, I thought I'd start a thread for the rest of us. To keep things manageable, how about a 5 hero limit with one line for each.
Evariste Galois - pulled the world's most famous all-nighter by writing down all the math in his head for posterity, then got killed in a duel in the morning.

Magic Johnson - did whatever it took to make everyone else around him better.

Rabbi Harold Kushner, who turned his personal tragedy into sharing spirituality and humanity in a manner I have found nowhere else.

Laura Barrett Mikesell - You never forget the teacher who actually encouraged you to do great things.

My grandfathers - made unimaginable sacrifices by coming to this country (U.S.) so that I could have this great life.
Ah, cool. I went to elementary school about 10 zip codes away. :)
Quit downmodding me, shitheads. I'm trying to keep this numbskull out of bankruptcy court or prison.

EDIT: No, really. I want ONE person to admit having downmodded me. Seriously. You've got some potential criminal posting shit here and he needs corrected.
What about Ken and Dennis.
> For static pages, there no reason to stick Apache in front.

Are you suggesting that static pages should hit the app server?
> What about the things you pass into the function? You can't know their properties in advance, in general, or can you?

You can know that, e.g. a function passed in as an argument can be dereferenced as a pointer stored in a specific offset on the stack.

If your typechecks are compiler-generated statements inserted before a function call, then if you know at compile-time (via declarations or type inference, or type propagation) that a certain variable (to be passed as an argument) will always be of the correct type T, then you can omit the typecheck, as well as boxing/tagging.

You can get really close to the metal this way, and still have your language be as dynamic as can be.
"Actually, their lungs."
cool. emailing. looking.
I've heard it argued pretty convincingly that the birth of photography is the root cause of the death of mimesis in art.
Off the top of my head

Linus Torvalds - Kernel Creator, and extremely smart.

Richard Stallman - For creating gnu, and helping us all to be free

erm... are fictional characters allowed?
YC: more competition ... Highland Capital Puts Out the Call for Student Entrepreneurs and Interns
Yeah that's really the catch-22 about it. If you don't set it up right initially, then you'll pay later.
People who download open-source code know that most code is in bad shape. They're very forgiving.
It seems to me that it was a marketing ploy to generate blogger and media buzz in advance of the actual premier. And it seems to have worked fairly well.
Yeah, I didn't phrase it right. What I suggested wasn't exactly the same thing, but it seemed more actionable.

What constitutes 'sucky' is often subjective and open to interpretation. You risk ending up as just another review site.

Defining sucks as 'broken', however, means focussing on things like "why the heck doesn't submit work here?" and so on. These websites have all been tested, even at the most monopolistic places. They just haven't been tested on some combination of browser and platform.

So that's how I made the subconscious transition from your idea to mine :)
Interesting idea, interesting people with enthusiasm. The challenge is convincing people of those three facts without coming across as an overbearing asshole.

Generally, you're going to have a hard time recruiting people that are going to be doing more work initially than you are going to be doing. I.E. a non-hacker trying to recruit a hacker to do some coding will have a tough time.
> Reading The Nude is like a ride in a Ferrari. Just as you're getting settled, you're slammed back in your seat by the acceleration. Before you can adjust, you're thrown sideways as the car screeches into the first turn. His brain throws off ideas almost too fast to grasp them.

Apparently it reads just like Snow Crash. ;-)
> To do really great things, you have to seek out questions people didn't even realize were questions. ... You only get one life. Why not do something huge?

This one really got me thinking. While tackling big questions is certainly admirable, it implies that greatness ought to be a goal one has in life. As I get older (I'm now married with 2 kids), I've become more and more convinced that it's more important in life to strive to be a good person than to strive to be a great person.

That's why my list would include people like Lao Tze, who would probably be happy that people found his writings useful, but would likely find the fact that he's still revered thousands of years after his death of far less importance than how he spent some particular day of his life.
Many of the design tips here are right on, it could use a bit of tightening. One very specific suggestion--try adding this to the style-sheet:

html {
overflow: -moz-scrollbars-vertical;
}

It will keep the scroll bars in Firefox from appearing and disappearing as new pages are loaded. The scroll bar wouldn't be an issue except that it alters the centering of the page.
The post says they have a lot of things built with this framework: http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/
The "looking cheap" bit can be important for many products. Many consumers would rather not pay for expensive advertising and design on products, and go for a products that appears ths most "no-frills."
From what I hear, most modern asian religions scholars believe the Tao was a satire.
Great question (and approach). I'm _kinda_ a non-hacker (started as a designer, now do a bit of front-end coding, etc).

The mutual respect thing (as aggieben says) is huge. The best way to approach this is to put in the line what you're going to do. How are you going to contibute AT LEAST your fair share in the early stages of the project. Not "When we're ready to talk to VCs, I'm the guy!" or "I'll talk to lawyers so you don't have to!", but "Here's the stuff I'm going to do EVERY DAY while you code."

Hopefully you have a good story to tell there. I've found that most people (who aren't hackers or designers) really DON'T, when it comes right down to it... But every business is different.

If you can't commit an equal share of the work (which is likely-- project management is not a fulltime job for a team of 2-3-- and it's honestly a burden for good hackers on teams of this size), then put something else on the line. Money is a good start.

If you don't have money and you don't have "buidling" skills, then I'm hard-pressed to understand how you could motivate "builders", other than the promise of "If you guys manage to build something great, I'll help make it successful".

The big problem is that it's hard to build something great (which is why a lot of people advocate for bring in biz ppl when and if you manage to pull that off).
"roger verbal kint" my hero number 3.
dean kamen

ayn rand

jay z

srinivasa ramanujan
Quick Summary: Richard Sennett's book is about the difference between workers and makers (craftsmen).

He says that modern technology makes us less able to know the distinction, but still finds examples in modern day, e.g. Japanese.

WSJ says that "postindustrial prosperity has helped craftsmanship to thrive," citing wine improving because of global competition... and (you guessed it) hackers who are leading the way in "capitalism's most dynamic sector."
Limiting it to 5 makes it tough! Right off the top I'm going to remove family members and Paul Graham from consideration (and encourage others to do so to obviate the need for any "obligatory mentions").

After a couple minutes thinking about it, I've got (in no particular order):

Hank Rearden (fictional) - A brilliant, but "normal" engineer and businessman breaks free of society's shackles through his ethics and determination. I try to channel him every time I sit down to work.

Jack Kerouac - Spent his life living, writing, dreaming and merging the three wherever he could. Maintained an ambitious vision of his life's work and actually finished it.

George Clooney - the guy emanates class.

Alexander Mackendrick - His teachings and notes on film directing are a tour de force. Creativity meets pragmatism.

Jeff Temple - Taught astrophysics at PA Governors' School for the Sciences. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to say that he's the reason I applied to MIT.

OK, I'm going to cheat now and add a couple extra mentors and friends whose heroics could scarcely fit one book, let alone one line.

Hal Abelson - My undergraduate advisor. Helped write SICP (one of the most important works I've read), spearheaded OpenCourseWare, showed me the intersection of technology and policy.

Patrick Winston - My undergrad project advisor. Headed the AI Lab, brilliant speaker, and a formative influence who molded my appreciation of "important work."

And one more cheat:

Richard Feynman - Great thinker, teacher, and human being.
1) find new name
2) if you don't want to do #1, domain name aftermarket, you can get it, just try hard, or you can use Godaddy or another 3rd party agent.
Gandhi
Nikola Tesla - great innovator, shitty businessman, edison sucks.
Philippines Faces IT Skills Shortage
"Robert Morris has a very unusual quality: he's never wrong."

I was only ever wrong once. I thought that I had been mistaken about something 5 years earlier, but it turned out I hadn't. I was wrong about having been wrong.
8 Tips for Increasing Your Average Sale
w00t. I for one am thankful that Google is on the side of making spectrum open instead of colluding with the networks.
Ben Franklin - The epitomy of cleverness.

Thich Quang Duc - A man who became an idea.

Galileo - Spoke truth to power.

Richard Feynman - A principled genius.
"The easier answer, which will work better than equity, is to open source."

Explain, please.
Where do you hear that? Got a link?
Scientists devise software that can interpret attractiveness
Apparently GCC is crimping Apple's style enough to justify a rewrite, although that may be due to licensing and lack of modularity more than ugly code.
E-mail isn't the only thing. If you look at the way advertising works on Chinese sites, it looks more like a street bazaar in terms of the experience.

It still amazes me that Chinese sites sell ads on a monthly/daily basis rather than CPM or hours spent on site.
Will doctors now prescribe a few hours of “Manhunt” in lieu of anti-anxiety meds?
Only a Steeler fan would include a Steeler player in their list of heroes. My dad is from Upper St. Clair... Steeler fans are nuts... Go Cowboys :)
Yes. Yes we are. :D
Among the ones you've heard of:

Tim Berners-Lee

Steve Wozniak

Warren Buffett
Yes. I was swapping a hard drive (to a bigger one) in my laptop.

Worked like a champ!
Steve Jobs - design + functionality + insane perfectionism = something great

William Blake - the most singularly original poet/artist I've ever read. I wish my products were like his poems.

Benjamin Franklin - limitless intellectual curiosity + an astonishingly good writer

Marcus Aurelius - the guy who'll get you through the bad times
"There have probably been other people who did this as well as Newton, for their time"

Einstein.
I've read about a dozen Wodehouse novels, and have yet to be disappointed by any of them. Some characters and some jokes are better than others, but I think you can pick one off the shelf at random and you'll be happy you did.

The one that comes to mind is "Leave it to Psmith," but not because it was necessarily such a standout book, but because of one line (concerning the name Psmith) that I still laugh about every time I think of it, years later.