skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was the big idea I came up with when I was trying to get outside of B2B. Consumers buy stuff all the time - America's economy is built on that! So if we can't make something that American consumers will buy, what does that really say about software entrepreneurs?
The future of the iPod
For a Christian, they are, as they charge interest. And the parent said he was doing Bible study.
Looking at the source, you can enable an pseudo-emacs mode with ":emacs". There don't seem to be very many commands implemented for it yet, though.
Very amusing story!

I know two solutions for the problem:

One is, don't buy drm'd music (and movies!) - we all knew that.

The other is, immediately play the music, send it with audio out to your stereo and through audio in back to the computer and record it. This limits the fun and is boring work, but then the music will be 100% drm free.

As for europe, this is even legal, because you don't break drm and recording comes with a quality loss (depending on your stereo and soundcard) - means, its not a copy.

Hm..., maybe 1 is the better solution...
Startups study
A new Kauffman Foundation study indicates that most tech firm founders are approaching middle-age and have extensive backgrounds business and technology. Findings from the study, a survey of 652 US-born technology firm executives, indicate:

- The median age at which founders started companies was 39.
- 92% of founders have bachelor’s degrees, while 31% hold master’s degrees, and 10% hold a Ph.D.
- 45% of founders started their companies in the state where they attended college.

What do you think? How well does that profile match your own experience?

If you want to know more about the study and the findings, you can download the report, Education and Tech Entrepreneurship by Vivek Wadha, Richard Freeman, and Ben Rissing, here: http://www.kauffman .org/pdf/ Education_ Tech_Ent_ 042908.pdf
For engineering skills and in the bay area start at $65 an hour then add $5 per year of solid work experience. Add 20% if the company is public.
Share anything. Anytime. Anywhere.
It would probably be best to monetize it as you would proxy site. With Adsense and a few affiliate banners. Then once traffic gets up a bit flip it on sitepoint.
TechCrunch: Opera Releases Firebug Alternative: Dragonfly
I don't think you've identified badness with OO programming styles; I think you've identified badness in the community of Thoughtworks developers.
Scala: A Scalable Language
Yeah one of the freenode servers seems to have. The easy solution is to try again - you get a different server each time.
Hopefuly the admin will notice their mistake, or we will be able to get hold of them.
Lisp: £47,422

Perl: £44,300 (£45,500 if you count "CPAN" as Perl)
I think the point is that Steve Jobs does a good job of making Apple seem like Santa's Workshop or something, which leads to a lot of people who drink the Kool-Aid wanting to come on board.

You're certainly allowed to think that Apple is simply a company that stuffs commodity hardware into particularly shiny boxes. Even if that's what you think, it's still an interesting case study in how to attract talent without paying a premium.
This is a maintenance nightmare. Now, whenever you add/change/remove a column, you not only have to update the table definitions, but you have to update the triggers as well. Chances are you'll forget and then updates will start failing all over the place, and the last place you'll look is the triggers. What about deleting the row? Do you clean up the history too? Either way you need a delete trigger as well.

Audit logging like this should be handled on the application level. That way you get to know who did the change, which is generally one of the most important parts of an audit trail.
Sure, they probably need to. I probably need to also. I'm actually somewhat new to freelancing so I am still doing a lot of adjusting.

Perhaps a lot of freelancers have a hard time asking for higher rates. Pricing is a difficult subject.
I recently read quotes from Dr. McCarthy that are quite critical of "liberals".

(some examples here: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/john_mccarthy.ht...)

Does Dr. McCarthy consider himself politically conservative, libertarian, or something else? Do any current presidential candidates or other politicians come close to reflecting his views?
Has he seen Arc? If so, does he find anything about it interesting?
See "choose a single layer of cleverness" at http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/2005_09.html (can't permalink because he partially recovered from a crash).
""Lisp was meant to be a language for AI research originally": false premise": false premise.

A programming system called LISP (for LISt Processor) has been developed for the IBM 704 computer by the Artificial Intelligence group at M.I.T. The system was designed to facilitate experiments with a proposed system called the Advice Taker, whereby a machine could be instructed to handle declarative as well as imperative sentences and could exhibit ``common sense'' in carrying out its instructions.

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive/node1.html
Eons Creates New Chief Product Officer Position, Looks to the Cloud for Some Services
TL;DR

OK - I'm joking (sort of). I do think it's telling that he finishes the article with this:

"Clearly, the average visitor won't make it too far through most of my articles. But I've consciously targeted a small, elite readership with a firm commitment to usability. If you target a broader audience or have sales cycles that are shorter than 5 years, you'd be wise to put your word count on a strict diet."

I think this actually says more than the pretty graphs and statistical dissection. Know your target audience. And for most of us, our target audience has a very short attention span. From his second graph, it looks like the sweet spot is a bit under 100 words. Yikes!
As I said in the article, I definitely am not against object-oriented programming. What I am against is this notion that we should strive towards some kind of "pure OO style" where encapsulation and polymorphism become goals in and of themselves.

Object-oriented techniques are a part of a balanced programming breakfast.
1. This doesn't sound like a great idea from the point of view of the person being interviewed. I would certainly want to know what my prospective peers will be like.

2. A manager that didn't allow his/her engineers to interview candidates would have to tread carefully to avoid making engineers feel that their judgement isn't trusted.

3. Self confidence probably has little to do with one's ability to judge the quality of a candidate. Technical proficiency, humility, preparation, and being a good listener seem like characteristics that would rank higher.
Though I don't use FriendFeed it sounds a bit like it...
There are millions of dollars being spent on brand advertising for various domain names - pretty much every one of them ending with .com. That is a powerful marketing machine behind one TLD...
Sorry, I can't stomach another self-righteous screed against people's private choices that offend the sensibility of the author. It seems that I was born without the "meddle in other people's affairs" gene, which is so widespread and popular in society. I can't get worked up in a hissy-fit if other people smoke, or watch goat porn, or work more than I would chose to. A lot of people think something is wrong with me, but I enjoy the free time I save from not caring about others' private lives.

The author's flawed world-view can be summed up in the following quote:

>In other words, if as a society we made a collective decision to get by on the amount we produced and consumed seventeen years ago, we could cut back from the standard forty-hour week to 5.3 hours per day

The error is that we "as a society" don't make choices. Individuals do. If I thought a conspiracy of government officials and oligarchs were making work choices for "society" as a whole, then I might be as offended as the author.

Humans have consistently chosen to live better rather than work less. I live in much greater wealth than my father did at my age in the '60s and '70s and I am happy about that. You would have a hard time convincing me to give up dishwashers, central air, my own bathroom, wireless internet, and satellite TV in order to work less. The average person in the western world has the electronic equivalent of hundreds of human servants working for him. It's my choice to accept the luxuries available to me, and other people are free to make different choices.
I was a depth geophysicist until a couple months back.
"I consider stored procedures and constraints vile and reckless destroyers of coherence."

Finally. Someone comes up with a technical description of how I've always felt. Thank you, dhh.
I am reminded of the constant fight to explain the difference between "if" and "iff."

We observe that really great OO code has small methods that do one thing well. IF great-oo THEN small-methods.

So is the answer to go out and refactor code so that each method only does one thing? This makes a different assumption: IF_AND_ONLY_IF great-oo THEN small-methods.
Another interesting technical fact that I found out when I was doing the research for this article was that prior to 2002, if someone typed a generic term into the address bar, most browsers automatically tacked on the .com extension, adding to the importance of the .com extension.
Don't Worry About College by John Taylor Gatto [PDF, p. 26]
Come on guys - modding down is OK, but -12? It's an opinion, not a charge on someones children.
That is very true. However, I would suggest that anyone in that position would not include this necessary legwork within their "eight hours a day." If you have several hours of non billable maintenance to do, it should not be a central part of your work day, which should be entirely billable.
Not really, this makes google reader and friendfeed play even nicer.
A "quote" isn't a number. It's text. With a number contained within somewhere, maybe.

Perhaps "proposal" is a better word.
The more eBay sticks their nose into Craigslist, the more Craig and Jim tweak it.
2008 Webby Awards Winners
Here are my numbers:

I do project management, usability, and generally make sure everything is on track - so it might not be exactly what you're looking for. But for what it's worth I charge $150 an hour, and can be negotiated down to around $100 if it's more than 2-300 hours.

My experience is that you shouldn't sell yourself too cheaply, since your customers then will regard you as being not very good at what you do.
>I doubt a libertarian scheme exists that could actually privatize them.

Private highways have been successful over the last several hundred years. The earliest highways in the United States were built without tax dollars. If you can't conceive of how roads could be privatized, I would say you lack imagination.

I agree that the gas tax bothers me less than other taxes, since it tends to be paying for use of the roads. However, if we were to tax it as much as other countries I would be offended.
I hope it changes as well. Competitive living is really unhealthy. We measure ourselves against others because that is the easiest measurement and we measure ourselves against others like us and near us because that is the most readily available and understandable benchmark.

I often hear it said that the desire of any parent is to have their kids be better off than they were. We seem to think that means our kids should live in bigger houses and have more stuff, when in reality it might mean that our kids should be just as comfortable but spend less time getting there and end up happier. Most people get rich so they can have expensive-looking things around the house for when guests come over. That's a cold war-like zero sum game that will eventually leave us unsatisfied and on fistfuls of designer mood medicine with bizarre cumulative side-effects.

Remember what Tyler Durden said: "The things you own end up owning you."
I don't think that's the right conclusion either. I think user mind-set is huge, here. Are they in shopping mode? Learning mode? Surfing mode?

I'd say 90% of the time that I scan, I'm looking for the bit of content that I care about-- NOT trying to decide whether the article is worth reading.
Swings and roundabouts.

Personally, I use Ruby for stand-alone apps more than for Rails. I do command line tools and Mac apps using RubyCocoa. I can't guarantee that my product functions as planned if I can't control what code it uses.

For libs which belong to the core OS, I am comfortable with using shared libs. These libs are very well documented, and the interfaces don't move. Any changes made by the OS vendor are generally for fixing bugs.

For everything else, I have no guarantee, and hence little trust, that the developer isn't going to change their lib in a way that breaks my code. In such a case, I much prefer to take control over that lib by bringing it into my own project as a static lib. I give my app it's own auto-updating feature, and I take responsibility for keeping the static libs up to date. That takes care of potential security issues.
Technology to Sales: The Evolution of a Software Startup
May I ask how you got this honor? How does one go about getting a meeting with John McCarthy, RMS,Stevey and other interesting people?
Four hurdles to jump after starting a business
The license on playsforsure lets you just burn the music to CD for playing in your normal CD player. Then you could re-rip it in FLAC or something lossless. I think that re-ripping back to a lossy format ends up being double bad when you burn from a compressed file to start with. Alternatively, you can just remove the DRM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_DRM#Removal
Meetup with startups in the Bay Area
To the YC Forum Community,
Are you working for a startup, running one, or maybe launching one in the Bay Area?

We are 3 recent college graduates working on a website that we hope to launch in 2-3 months. We are planning a trip to the Bay Area in the last week of July and we would love to talk to a few people about their experiences in founding a startup and/or working for one. If we can meet you, please feel free to reach me at amrithk(at)gmail(dot)com and we can schedule something. Thank you all in advance for your time.
>Well, if you don't know enough to miss them, I don't have any way to argue with you--there's no common language in which we can converse about them.

While I agree with your actual premise ; this statement is pretty bad form. It is the logical equivalent of a Christian saying that in order for me to critique his faith, I must become a Christian.

Replying, "you wouldn't know; you're an imperative programmer" is moot; maybe he is an imperative programmer - but he could also be correct. There is no connection between the two. Deductive logic has never been allowed in the scientific method, which is, ultimately, the barometer of truth.

I'm aware that Graham is the originator of this somewhat popular meme, but it's a wrong popular meme. The nature of ignorance of certain desirable features can only explain why people don't immediately demand them; it doesn't prove their usefulness.
Developer by day. Programmer by night.
Lightweight linksharing. Friendfeed, twitter, tumblogging, and now google enters the space.

I think this is probably too tied to gReader to make a real go of it... but this particular problem is ripe enough that I'm working on an idea in the space, too.
HOW DO I POST A JOB TO HACKERNEWS?
This style strikes me as similar to higher forms of database normalization. The efforts generally outweigh the benefits.
This seems to be a poor study of the economics of branding and churn (apologies, I have forgotten the technical term for that piece of slang).

This really is a terrible article, and it spends a good deal of it's time dealing in analogy, mixed up (and long disproved) ideas of economics and sociology.

It is so bad, that I cannot stomach to read all of it.
We do large amounts of consulting, and I just had the experience of contracting out the look-and-feel of the Rails UI for our product to one designer and our print collateral to another, so I feel like I've been on both sides of this.

You should know that the "I think we should talk, what's your budget" answer is pretty unfriendly, even though it makes business sense. When your prospect is reaching out to 5 different firms for a competitive bid, it's really annoying for them to have to convince you to cough up your rate.
Andrew Chen: Has the Facebook platform hit its peak?
> This is sumo wrestling, not fencing.

Very good point.

I still think big companies can fence. Granted, Amazon's market cap is only like 1/10th of that ($32 billion), but it's AWS products are fairly innovative and leading their space at the moment. So big companies can innovate, they just seem slow and totally random about it.

I guess I'm just not seeing what there is to 'blunt force' in the market. You can't force people to buy your ad space. I guess if they could demonstrate clearly more eyeballs and higher CTR than adwords, advertisers would flock... is that what you envision?
You said,

"My experience is that you shouldn't sell yourself too cheaply"

and

"can be negotiated down to around $100"

My experience is that I don't negotiate. About half my prospects offer something lower. I usually say something like, "I don't compromise my rates and I don't compromise my work." Most of them accept. But it's OK, even if they don't. Just never allow yourself to be in the position where you have to negotiate because you need the gig so badly.
Become an Expert with the Power of Deliberate Practice
Ew, how unimaginative. I think it's probably more clever to exploit the fact that people are associating sites with each other - if someone is interested in one, they'd be interested in the others. Maybe start a web search?
I've read this study, and looked at the sources. There's strong selection bias; they aren't accurately selecting startups of the particularly technical kind. Their survey also requires people to respond, of which less than half did.
5 Scary Psychological Experiments
I'd like to see a similar breakdown of software companies specifically. I'm sure there are more young founders of software startups than hardware, biotech, etc.
Webbie Award Winners
Anyone who has tried to buy a domain knows that a lot of names have been reserved by domainers who have not built out entire sites on the domains. They are often parked and have little content other than pay per click ads on them.

The reason a lot of domainers like .com is that most browsers default to it. For example, if you type "widget" into your browser address bar, most browsers will redirect you to http://widget.com.

This captures a noteworthy percentage of traffic from internet users that don't understand the difference between the browser address (URL) box (which happens to be quite large and in the top center of most browsers) and the search box (which is often much smaller and in the upper right corner).
I just read through the whole submission and replies. I woke up with a feeling of dread because I remembered that I posted something (and not what that something was) to HN last night after having a few drinks at my friend's going away party. Yikes...

With that admission, and in a completely sober state this time, I would rephrase the question. First, I apologize for the over-the-top remarks in the original submission completely.

Since it sparked some discussion on improving HN though, at least it wasn't a complete waste. Obviously I do think HN is an amazing resource already and I'll be here for a long time to come hopefully :) I also do understand some stories (esp. ones about exciting happenings at bigger companies, which all were once startups) get votes and are interesting to HN readers including myself. I totally followed the Yahoo/MS stuff as well, like a moth to a flame :)

As a discussion forum or a resource someone can turn to for access to the startup community though, HN as it stands is a news site and not a forum. The news-style voting efficiently filters for hackers who have little time to be sifting themselves, and a few false-positives being missed is worth it. But I think there's an opportunity to improve the utility of HN as a community and make it even more useful for founders and would-be founders.

I don't think adding a forum is the right approach, because that eliminates the filter, which is undesirable. But if you add a section for 'Ask' style posts, you'll keep the voting and you've essentially got a forum with a filter.

If the site keeps growing, which it seems you're actively trying to control (I remember recent discussion about removing HN from some search engines), adding a few other sections might help too. But limiting growth is good, and multiple sections may enable an explosion of growth in content and so in types of readers (as opposed to just founders and would-be founders).

Whatever the current algorithm is, it did bury my last post within seconds. I had my partner vote on it right away as well, but we literally went page after page and gave up after about 10 pages of clicking 'Next' and didn't see it anywhere about 10 seconds after submitting it. So it seems like it never had a chance, and it may be that new submissions are being too aggressively filtered in the current algorithm...

Anyway, I better go set my workstation password to something I can't type if I've had a few drinks ;)
wave - Very very nice idea. Good execution, great concept. I often have to do this, and hats off to you, coz I did not think of this.

One small suggestion, and I might be splitting hairs here, but maybe make the tabs on the top a little more prominent. I missed it the first time around. Nothing that you need to take care of, I just figured I would pen it down.

I also see that you are not checking the url to see if its valid (which is fine). It does bring up one problem and that is if I link to three HM links, they all show up as the same name in the tab. Maybe give an option to name the tab... ?

Update - Woops, ca98am79 had the same suggestion as me. Sorry. Did not see that prior to posting my comment
Learn unix. you will gain a great company.
Wow, I'm surprised too. I'm betting it's not the normal crowd -- or it has grown much larger over the past month?
"Alternatively, you can just remove the DRM:"

yes, you can, but thats illegal.
I was thinking about a legal way.
"It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter."

http://www.guppylake.com/~nsb/pithy.html

:-) [This is a joke. I have no comment about the issue being discussed.]
What do you mean by "big language?" Importance (a subjective value) or most widely used (overall or for specific domains) or something else?

Lisp is a functional language, c is an imperative language.
Wouldn't a language "in the middle" risk being a compromise, effectively diminishing or negating the advantages of each?
One of the comments mention an API that could be used to integrate it with other browsers. I hope he was right, because it would be very cool to have just one debugging tool for all of the browsers out there.
Although Firefox 3.0b5 is better overall, currently it crashes each time I try to log into Godaddy.
Ironic that an article on how little users read is so long!
Then don't comment on it.
sure, i'm all for freedom of choice. but you can't ignore that there are conscious decisions about how society is run that wind up heavily influencing people's behavior.

what do you think all those government agencies do? FCC, FDA, FAA, IRS, the Fed, etc. (department of education has a huge influence on ideology). There are dozens of major ones that affect our decisions by deciding what A and B will be and excluding C.
At least in Massachusetts, sales taxes are for physical products, not services. Repairmen don't charge sales tax, for example.
would have been nice if you add NSFW to the title or not post since it is not at all relevant to this site