skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the more I interact with the business world the more I realize that there are talkers and there are doers. You become successful not just by being a doer, but by surrounding yourself with other doers.

The nice thing about doers is that it's very easy to spot if you know what you're looking for.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/planetargon/127984254/
My design mantra is: make it easier for the user to go to the next step than it is to for the user to go goof off on reddit.

using this, i work from the bottom up. I find which part of the user experience is the most boring and try to improve that until it isn't the most boring part. then repeat.
internet porn: ultimate enemy of productivity
The real Twitter scaling issue - Us
a boss willing to go to bat for his employees work rather than pass the buck. I wouldn't mind working for them.
Yeah, I tried KDE4 and quickly reverted it. Support seems very preliminary. KDE3 seems solid, though.
I'm reading a good book at the moment - Growing a Business by Paul Hawken. He has this to say about ideas:

"The idea itself is just the tip of the iceberg. The iceberg is your life. Don't worry about anyone stealing your idea, because they can't steal your life."

That's resonated a lot with my experience so far. I've had to make literally hundreds of decisions, from tiny software architecture ones to big ones like who are we serving and what will our product let people do. I suspect that in mature businesses, that'll grow into thousands or tens of thousands. Each one is an expression of who you are as a founder. Even if you wrote down everything you know about your business and handed it to a competitor, they wouldn't be able to replicate what you're doing, because of all the unspoken assumptions behind your decision-making.

This is perhaps why it's so hard to manage employees before you've achieved product-market fit. (I worked as an employee in two other startups, both before product-market fit, before starting my own.) If your competitors don't get it, there's no reason your employees will be able to either, unless you can show them what your doing and how it impacts people's lives.
To be fair to MT, the recent versions have a nice setup wizard. It's still more trouble to install than WordPress, but there are far fewer instances where you're seeing configuration files in Movable Type these days. (But we use WordPress, anyway.)
I coudn't find a version of the new in english, so I post a version of a similar change in Spain.
Haha, I am more intrigued at how that is something like a third degree cultural reference, like (japanese-import-culture (usa-culture (pokemon (xkcd linux)))

I guess the reversed/flipped sexpr works too.
Whoa, stop right there.

Mac is very similar to Linux in the way most users approach the dev. environment. That is: souped up editors in favour of full IDE's. That being said XCode (from apple) would be the VS of the mac world for cocoa apps. Of course Eclipse is present as well.

Most popular and "macish" though is text-mate. That's what all the cool kids use.

Having moved from windows previously, I can tell you that the level of integration and features from VS and the like is not found on either Mac or Linux. That will take some getting used to, but I've found that it's not too much of a big deal once you get over the initial shock.
Keynotes from RSA Conference 2008
You'd be better off turning the idea into a prototype and asking for advice then. The community here seems pretty good every time a new site is reviewed.
Recommendations / Tips to Hiring Young, Web Savvy Stars?
I'm looking to hire a young, web-savvy internet jock - someone who lives and breaths web 2.0.

I'd love advice on the best places to find such a person - can be great job boards, conferences, etc. What's worked for you?

By the way, the job is at Widgetbox (www.widgetbox.com, http://www.quantcast.com/p-3ayZhMX92Pd1o). If interested yourself - email me (ryan at widgetbox.com)!
Check out mydomainsucksbecausetheyrealltak.en

It's a hot new service.
When it comes to cost cutting, many times it’s design or marketing that goes first. This is like an applicant ditching the cover letter on their resume when the job market is down: it’s laughably bad timing.

I'm so, so sick of this kind of post. Some design guy thinks design guys are not well treated. OK, sure, maybe, why not. Then the guy goes on to say how design is everything. Sometimes the design guy disses the hacker for skimping for a few hundred on design. Other times the design guy insults the hacker's taste.

"Design" is not the only part of the business where you design things. In product development you design too. The "design" branch is the one concerned with the design of things that don't change the function of your product, just the appearance. It's makeup. Design, as a verb, is important, but what this guy is talking about, "design" as a branch of business, is really exactly the first place to skimp.

Not that skimping in this area will not have its costs. The reason you have to cut costs to begin with implies cutting something that you may need. If you have been running a tight ship, anything you cut will hurt somewhat. It's like starving. After a while, your body starts consuming parts of your organs. It consumes developed skeletal muscles preferentially. Sure they're important -- they wouldn't be there in the first place if they weren't -- but they aren't your liver. You won't die from having your muscles catabolized. People often talk about the other branches and go back and forth over which matters most. "The market is everything." "No, the product -- the product matters the most." I feel these discussions sometimes omit the fact that many areas can be necessary, just like you need several organs to survive. Is your liver more important than your heart? A moot point. You need a market, you need a product, you need to monetize eventually. You can argue that any one of these is essential, and you'd be right. But design? Design is the appendix of a startup. At best, it is the second kidney. Nobody cares what your logo looks like. Nobody cares about the favicon. The buttons don't need to be 2.0. None of these things are very important, and worse, they're not even that hard to do. Making a passable favicon is not that hard, and you can always pimp it if/when you have tons of VC money.
The point is that the connection between a domain name and what a site is about is broken.

All your problems can be solved with a Domain Numbering System I mention in the comments. Map a nondescript number or another IP to your real IP. This way, people don't even expect a connection to what you do. They'll just find you through a search engine anyway.
PS3 Gran Turismo Series as MySpace for Gearheads
The OSX Focus-Follows-Mouse Debate
Scrum is also reminiscent of pyramid schemes. Anyone who sits through a 2 day course is a "Certified Scrum Master" - strong overtones of snake oil.
This is awesome, thanks.

One suggestion: it would be even more useful (for my purposes at least) if you had another version that only included the full posts, rather than having the full posts in addition to having separate files for each comment subthread. The way it is now, there is a lot of data duplication, since a comment of depth n will appear in n separate files.
Ah yes, fluffy pablum from the man who stared in Expelled, the movie about why big science is a big conspiracy to keep down THE TRUTH about intelligent design.
"Software development processes, as "corporate" as they may appear, are absolutely necessary in any professional development environment."

You need to be explicit what you are saying here. If you are saying that any team has a "way of working", i.e you equate a "process" to a "loosely defined way of working", then you are right, but that is a tautology.

A working team has a way of working... duh!

If you are saying that you need one of these branded / book and consultant heavy "methodologies" to be "professional", then that is a less easily defended statement.

"No offense, but if you don't believe me, you've never written a project big enough to matter."

This is very condescending and very bad logic to boot. No your "no offense" does not help. If you have an argument, just lay it out and swallow the insults. Thanks in advance!
I have read that they [Y Combinator] give their investees t-shirts reading "Make what people want."

This is what happens when you believe everything you read: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=157005
This is a great essay.

The approach of converting scheme code into C (and possibly assembly) via series of correctness preserving transforms is explained in great detail in Friedman and Wand's "Essentials Of Programming Languages".

Get the first edition if you can. It is more comprehensive then the second edition. The third edition should be out in a few weeks so you may want to wait for that, if you plan to buy book.
Are his words any less valid because of that?
Angerwhale.

http://www.angerwhale.org/
Just to give more context, this idea is a social community site, think YC news but its not the same. I know that I would love that such a site exists but I want to know that I'm not alone without having to spend time knocking out a prototype.
For anyone interested in the original paper (this journal is freely available to all): http://download.ajhg.org/AJHG/pdf/PIIS0002929708002553.pdf
I would like a way to blacklist domains that are being squatted. I’ve thought it might work to have a Firefox plugin to report and block these sites. If you could get a large enough community using it, the list would grow pretty quickly. You could maybe even have a script that would gray out any of those sites on Google. Would this be enough of a disincentive to squat?...if the domain was effectively "removed" from the Internet for those using the tool. If a domain was actually bought and contained real content, it could be removed from the blacklist...but the process to do so would have to be difficult enough to not negate the disincentive of the blacklist. Any other ideas on how to harm the value of a squatted domain enough to make squatting not worth while? (When I say squatting I also mean domains that are just parked and for sale. Technically I don’t think that is squatting, but it seems like that is being lumped in the conversation here...could be misunderstanding that though.)
That original comment is hilarious in this context
100 most popular words twittered this week
Provide a great environment with lots autonomy, no politics, and a strong equity stake.
Xcode to organize the project, Emacs for editing, Make (with targets that use xcodebuild to do the actual building and stuff).

It's kinda weird, I know, but I just prefer to use Emacs for editing instead of Xcode.
Even superstar hackers introduce the occasional bug.

Mr. Bloch is listed as the author of java.util.EnumMap. The clone() method doesn't reset the entrySet member. So changes to the original will seemingly affect the clone.

(Source code of java.util.EnumMap http://www.jdocs.com/page/AjaxSourceCode?oid=57699 )

I filed a bug report on this long ago but no luck. This bug has been present in every JDK release since 1.5.
But what if your markup wasn't all that high to begin with? That's 7 points off your gross margin, which is nothing to sneeze at.

Assuming a 30% gross margin-- to get that $2m, you'd have to spend $1.54m in COGS, for a gross profit of $462k. Add the 70k in amazon fees, and that's starting to seriously affect your balance sheet.
Interesting how the domain is shown here with an extra period at the beginning "Hey Rails, nice Rack! (.brainspl.at)". I am guessing it must be coz it is a bare domain (no www) and pg is working his way backwards from the first single / (or eol) and he expects at least three parts: TLD, domain name and subdomain name and puts "." between each.

Update: Did a quick test.

Submitted: http://127.0.0.1/this/that

Showed up as: (1.0.0.127) !

Wow that is totally not what I expected.
The leakiness of web mail
Everyone's joking around in these comments, but... in my current job (working for a huge silicon valley company) I hear quite a few stories of people addicted to speed pills or similar "uppers" because they need the energy to keep up with work. Or Ambien, after a lot of irregular sleeping schedules. A lot of times it's hard to admit it because it's tied up with feelings of worrying you're not good enough. But a lot of people say it's okay, too.

Anyway, I'd be curious what the HN community thinks about the more-addictive but arguably-better-for-working sorts of drugs.
It's also a selection bias-- $5000+5000n effectively rules out most people who are farther along in life.
That is an interesting idea. It sounds kind of like a user-driven pagerank concept. Since the mappings would be different for everyone (most of the population would not map 'news' to 'news.ycombinator.com') could even introduce a recommendation system where your unmapped pseudonyms came from users whose pseudonym mappings were most like yours.
XCode.

If you're using VisualStudio on Windows, XCode is what you'll want on Mac. The other comments here about Emacs and whatnot aren't really relevant because if you were a die-hard Emacs / CLI guy you'd be using them on Windows too.
I've posted here before - both my idea and the prototype. You really don't have anything to fear. most people here have more ideas than time and resources to actually implement them (let alone "steal" your idea). not to mention people here consistently give good feedback. typically the brutal, logical feedback is best, though not pleasant
Easy Recipes
Easy recipes breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert.
Does anyone else have good suggestions?
How Good Lighting Can Make Digital Renders Look Real
It's a bad idea to use speed regularly because tolerance rapidly builds to addictive hard drugs. The greatest productivity enhancement would come from very occasional use of stimulants to give a sustained productivity boost over a single day.
Hostile bid for Yahoo could change future of the web
I actually use Emacs for editing code on Windows when I work on Python or Ruby stuff. :)

I don't really use .Net or VS but yes, I agree that he should definitely take a look at Xcode.
Is the 1st edition a very good book? I've heard about it but never checked it out.

My current favorite is Head First Java. I've successfully helped 2 non-hackers to learn Java with it. The casual (even comic) writing style is really easy to read.
Mortgage Calculator Widgets
A startup exists to make extraordinary profits by arbitraging a temporary economic disequilibrium by doing more than anyone thought possible with less than anyone thought possible; the industry is irrelevant.
Could you please care to elaborate ? Not very sure what that means.
Yes. It isn't exactly a challenge to find great artists and writers who worked prodigiously through their lives and remained poor. I'm sure Vincent van Gogh appreciates Stein's patronizing explanation of how the world works though.
I've played with KDE 4 a bit, and it looks like it steals Apple's font antialiasing algorithm... at least for Konqueror. It's really pretty.

The nice part is that it works fine with xmonad, which is something I couldn't give up. I used to take great pride in perfectly arranging my windows. Complete waste of time, it's much nicer to have the computer do it for you.
I wrote my own, but I did end up copying 2 functions from WordPress (wpautop and some kses input stuff).
Five Things Startups Should Not Skimp On
The Startup Curve
I don't think that had anything whatsoever to do with my point. Is Threadless a startup?
The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He’s Black
true, many great people worked hard throughout their lives and still never achieved success in their lifetime. But on the other hand I can't think of a single great personality who made it WITHOUT real hardwork.
New Algorithms For Wireless Networks
Linus Torvalds actually said Git was probably a bad idea for doing the home directory thing, but that hasn't stopped people from trying. I'd be interested to hear more first-hand stories from other hackers doing the same thing.
come to the "Creating Infectious Engagement Conference" next Thursday at Stanford.
Scott Berkun: How to innovate on time (slides)
The Problem with Software Registration
One of the problems is Git cannot handle multi-gig files, so if your home includes some virtual machines that you want backed up/sync'd amongst computers, then Git can't be your whole solution.
Grad Students Redefine Easy Money With $1-a-Letter Web Site
I think lots of people have this issue, and it's backwards.

Domains are used as identifiers, so people associate them with brands.

They are horrible identifiers. It needs to stop. Your domain is not your brand.

I'm incredibly lucky to have tipjoy.com.
It's such an excellent and short name, on a .com. I'm amazed it was available. That this is the exception is an indication of the problem.
Yahoo's Open Strategy and the Yahoo Application Platform
Ask YC: How to get TechCrunch'd?
What can a new & growing web startup do to boost its chances of getting TechCrunch'd?
No it doesn't. Further along also means financial resources or contacts that can make up the difference.
1) get funded
2) be outstanding
3) become popular
Mac enthusiasts starting younger and younger all the time (pic)
Offer Michael Arrington an opportunity to kick you when you're down.
I think the person suited best to answer this question would be Mike Arrington himself:

http://omnisio.com/startupschool08/mike-arrington

Main point: Tell a story. Don't just bombard him with the same bland description of your site. Leak information so that he can piece together a greater conspiracy. And make the process of giving information valuable, as in not constantly talking about your startup in twitter, but just leaking little tweets here and there so as to make people think they've discovered a gem.
Like a mix of pet names and a Levien trust metric.

http://www.erights.org/elib/capability/pnml.html
http://www.levien.com/free/tmetric-HOWTO.html
Looking for a break from the start-up grind?
Very interesting position for those with start-up backgrounds looking to make social change.
Does 5000 karma points count?
I like this article as a summary of the State of the Hype, but I'm skeptical of the word "inflection point". Most of what I see here is either noise (spiky but meaningless) or long-term trends. Some of these trends are ten years old and more:

Today you'd be nuts not to look seriously at PHP, Python, and Ruby.

If you substitute "Perl" for "Ruby", this sentence could have been written in 1999. The only difference is that Java was on the upward slope of the hype curve back then, so fewer people would have believed the sentence.

I'd agree that software is changing a lot right now. But is it really changing that much more rapidly now than in, say, 1998? Or 1988?
YCombinator startups are startups - it seems that most of them are built to be sold - with a quick (ish) payoff for the founders and investors who sacrificed a lot.

37s viewpoint is more about a sustainable "small" business. Both are valid.

PS I am 33 w. kids as well, and know what it is like. In some ways, you can have a lot more time to think/hack, as you tend to spend more time at home (and quiet time is spent at home, not out at the pub).
If you have financial resources - I guess you would only go to YC for the publicity ? The money would mean nothing.
I don't agree with 100% with Ben Stein on everything (ex his new movie), but research does back his article (old YC post):

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19125691.300

"It's complicated explaining how genius or expertise is created and why it's so rare. But it isn't magic, and it isn't born. These people don't necessarily have an especially high IQ... And the one thing they always have is this incredible investment of effort."
it broke my nvidia drivers.
That caught my eye too kirubakaran.

When I submit http://127.0.0.1:3000, I got "0.1:3000"

I submitted http://localhost:3000 and ended up with ".localhost:3000"

Going with http://192.168.1.104:3000, I ended up with "1.104:3000"

When I go with a bare http://127.0.0.1, I also get the unexpected "1.0.0.127"
When I used windows, it was emacs. When I used solaris in college, it was emacs. When I use linux at work, it's emacs. So obviously when I use my mac at home, it's emacs. Emacs now and forever.
A bazillion versions of 99 Bottles of Beer
http://ycombinator.com/about.html
Basically, numeric-only domains?
Yowch. I'm wondering how this can be a good thing...
I didn't add those labels, though. Those were added by Trevor as a joke.
Since it's annoying to dig around to find it... :-)

"Continuous Posted-Price Auction for Internet Domain Names
Feb 27, 2008 at 4:22 am from Mountain View, CA
Problem: Internet domain names have a squatting problem. Buying and keeping a domain is so cheap that people will "squat" on good domain names, in the hope of selling it later for a huge markup. In the meantime, they collect ad revenues from people who haplessly wander onto their otherwise empty sites.

It is almost impossible to buy a domain from a squatter. They have a monopoly on that particular domain name, so they can try to hold out on coming to an agreement in hopes of receiving a higher payout.

Solution: A continuous posted-price auction for internet domain names.

The domain name owner determines the value V that they derive from owning the domain for a year...."
Umm do you guys not see the incredible value of indexing the thoughts of millions of people? How about having access to millions of consumers' email inbox - basically that is what Twitter is!

Companies can use it to monitor their brand and provide better service. The market research industry could be negatively impacted and other things too!

I thought Twitter was so dumb, but once you get enough followers you will see the immense value and hopefully innovate from there!
Faster - Why Constant Stress is Part of Our Future
It's a geat book. Required reading if you're coding Java. Google gives it out to new employees.

Joshua Bloch writes well and is more qualified that most to write a book on Java. His little stories that he weaves in about this part or that of the standard library being broken are pretty sweet.
Consumer Web 2.0 is dead, Long live Enterprise Web 2.0 
It’s been almost 4 years since Tim O’Reilly coined the term Web 2.0. According to Forrester, enterprise market is going to be a huge and estimates it around $4.6 billion globally by 2013. With consumer Web 2.0 companies struggling to make revenue, is Enterprise Web 2.0 the future. What do u guys think?
Looking to work with a startup? Make parody "ads" starring yourself!
great marketing idea my friend in SF is using in regards to working with a startup. Favorite is: License To Monetize
If you're actually building Mac-specific applications then XCode should be in the loop since it can help a lot with the Mac-specific shme.

If you're developing web applications or anything portable then use whatever you like. You can find for Mac versions of the standards: Emacs -> Aquamacs, Vim -> MacVim, etc.

There are some Mac-only development tools in various categories so you might want to check out sites like MacUpdate, Macworld, MacMerc. For example, if you pair program with others, definitely check out SubEthaEdit.