skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, it makes sense that they would never lack for a job! I guess that could make them an even more valuable commodity than an awesome hacker. Hmm, perhaps it would be smart to look for them at a younger age, before they get into an established sales position.
is this a good thing? my tiny brain is confused...
Paul Graham’s Checklist, Would You Make The Cut? [Video w/TechCrunch]
I'll never forget this essay, because he first delivered it as a talk at Harvard that Steve and I trained up from Virginia to attend. After Steve had lent me Masters of Doom, I was already convinced we should start a startup together, but this talk sealed the deal. I know Chris Slowe (later our first 'hire' at reddit) was in the audience that evening and I'm sure a number of other future YCers were also there with no clue of where it would lead.

Thank you, Paul Graham, for making that comment about finding investment from rich people who'd done it before (but not him). If I recall, it was feeling guilty about hearing the dejection in the room that got him thinking about starting Y Combinator.

And what a difference that decision has made in so many of our lives.
Further - the one with the info is truly responsible for keeping it a secret. Maybe the Pentagon should look internally if they want to see the real leaker. However - it has to be said that the more secrets weigh on the conscience, the more risk they are of compromise. The worse the moral perception of the act, the more risk of a leak.
you traded your freedom to tinker

What kind of nonsense is this?
That makes sense. I guess they would need to be convinced their income potential could benefit greatly with the move.
Gotta hand it to Zed, the guy never skimps on quality documentation.
IRC is one of the primary communication tools for Wikipedia and its sister projects. The community is so distributed, coordinating meetings using UTC time becomes second nature.

There are dozens and dozens of channels. This page attempts to track just some of them.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Channels

And even the non-technical staffers at the Wikimedia Foundation hold "office hours" on IRC from time to time.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours
Natural language parsing for the web
I'm one of the few non-programmers here, and I figured this would be a good place to ask: Right now, few applications are coded to utilize so many cores. Is this simply a matter of programmers transitioning to coding for multi-core computers, or are some types of software not good candidates for taking full advantage of so many cores?

I have an 8-core Mac Pro, and I was hoping to see its performance improve over time as software took better advantage of the hardware, but I don't see that happening yet.
Sharing proteomics data, trickier than it seems
Zed,

I also belong to the ranks of people who don't get offended when you insult people. But I wonder what you gain from it. 1. How do you know that the people who do get offended are the same people you don't want to work with? 2. How do you know that ranting actually deters these people from using your products?

My point is similar to jpeterman's, but my focus is on how you know that you are actually setting and upper bound on your readership, and if you are, how do you know that you are benefitting?
What happens when coal is gone?
Totally. I help out on the #ubuntu channel, and get help on the #python channel.

I avoid #politics
Well sure, that might be a good answer. Another good answer might be, "the execution is more important than the idea." I was just pointing out that he misinterpreted the question.
Optical Illusions That Trigger Your Brain
Can you see different things in one photo? If you can then you most probably have a good eye for details and that you are concentrated.
Gnu brands it, the Gnome developers build it, and seemingly Red Hat mostly pays for it. This is what I meant by "not really".
Get a livescribe pen http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/ and get rid of that Windows partition. :)
I think the two really killer features are probably the most obvious one: searching and rating. If I know that the thing I'm looking for ... whether it's learning ruby or implementing something in jQuery, or plugging a hole in my car's tire ... is easy to find, and that what I find is going to be quality, then that site is going to come to mind quickly when I'm looking for instructions on how to do something. Stack Overflow's done this well, in that their content is so good, and so easily discoverable, that it's a no-brainer as my first go-to place for figuring out coding problems.
D.I.Y. Detroit: A Hands-On Approach to Fixing the Auto Industry
> Honestly, calling yourself an idiot is a huge turnoff.

Really? I call it honesty, but maybe I'm just an idiot.
How to steal corporate secrets in 20 minutes: Ask
Yieldable Python Threads
Venter also wanted to patent the whole human genome once he'd sequenced it. It was only by a huge and expensive effort by the Wellcome charity that the genome was sequenced and made freely available

Not only Wellcome (although their Sanger Centre was a major player), but a whole worldwide bucket of public money.

It also bears mentioning too that on March 14, 2000 Bill Clinton and Tony Blair issued a joint statement saying that the results of genomic sequencing shouldn't be patented. The biotech sector lost $40bn in value as a result[1], as it became evident the patent business model was dead.

[1]http://books.google.com/books?id=FOk3LE70l1EC&lpg=PA284&...
I'm talking to Pete Krawczyk about "Perl 6 for Perl 5 Programmers". Is that more what you have in mind?
We have been wearing such clothes since around 1801 when automatic looms took over.
Eat your dessert first.
During one of the all-night engine runs a few days before First Flight, I was running the engines ... I looked over the side and saw a large puddle of hydraulic fluid... I asked what happened, and he said it must have been a loose B nut... We were all sleepy, so we went home and thought no more about it. !!

wtf?! you're test piloting a mulit-million dollar jet plane, it starts leaking fluid when you're testing the engine on the ground, it leaks fluid, and since you're sleepy you just forget about it and go home?! That's pretty crazy. I guess these guys are more gung-ho than I thought. Would you even do that even if you were testing a race car?
It would be interesting to know how many HN readers have first seen and/or read this essay just now, after seeing this thread. Or have we all read it years ago...
Autorelease is Fast
This is a good question and the answer is it's both.

It requires a completely different approach to programming so many programmers haven't made the leap. Additionally, some kinds of software problems seem to be unparallelizable by default.

Having said that, there is an advantage to a many-core machine right now: you can run many tasks (programs) simultaneously. Even if a program can only use one core, your OS should be smart enough to run it on its own core.

Of course then they might contend for other resources, like disk or video throughput.
I'm a huge fan of pinboard.in - minimal and fast.
"First off, I didn't insult you by name right? Which means I didn't insult _you_ I insulted your ideologies."

I speak for myself, not for the supposed audience you're alienating, but I simply do not like your tone. That doesn't mean i'm insulted or offended, but it simply means I don't like it when people feel the need to vent in such a harsh manner.

Having said that, I do respect you for putting your money where your mouth is.
First off, let me put on my grammar-nazi hat and say that it should be "Are there any..."

Second, where do you expect to apply your "basic programming" skills? Pretty much the only other option out there is to write desktop or mobile apps, which in today's world probably interface with the web in the end, so knowledge of web development is crucial anyway.
Youtube in 2005
Tetris in Javascript
If I was writing for the lowest common denominator, I would be writing about lolcats and celebrities.

The problem is that even the high-brow audience coming from Hacker News and the programming subreddit (where most of my audience is from) have tiny attention spans unless they are reading what they want to believe. People won't even spend 20 seconds to read your post unless you are a celebrity like Paul Graham.

If you like the idea of a personal diary that no one reads, put it in a text file. Put it online, and you'll have to deal with spammers, hackers, and critics that don't even bother to read the article and insult you. If you want to see what I mean by this, take a look at the comments of my most commented posts. It is really discouraging.
Both, not all tasks are equally parallelized. Some, like the graphics rendering pipeline, data mining, search indexing, and others can reap the benefits and already do. However, there are many tasks that don't parallelize as easily and lead to the programmer waiting for one synchronous task after another due to a dependency. Even if you did run the tasks in parallel the one would need to block and wait until the other completed.

In some cases the programming languages are just ill suited to handle performing concurrent operations free of side effects. Programs written in the languages would have to be rewritten (not likely for many apps). Parallel Studio, by Intel, attempts to make the task easier on programmers working in c++/Windows to identify such cases. Still, others have proposed and attempted to create a layer beneath the programming language that automatically detects code that can be safely executed concurrently without side effects. There's still no silver bullet that's suddenly going to give significant gains without modifications to existing code at this point.
The scripts are ugly, bug-ridden and fragile. I wouldn't let anyone see them, and I don't really have the time to tidy them up.

Having said that, I will go and have a look at them again later this week. Feel free to email me again to remind me and ask me how it's going. No guarantees, though ...
I don't think this will be as big a deal as the author thinks. I assume Notion Ink will be able to get access to the higher resolution screens form PixelQi, and that means that only the first version of the device won't be upgradeable to 3.0.

So they should be able to get the early adopters out their promoting the product, and as it picks up steam get the newer version with the new OS and higher screen resolution out in the market.

I suspect that the early adopters will know about the resolution change and that it won't be upgradeable, but likely won't care. I think this is a similar position with the apple iPad isn't it? I believe the iPad can't be upgraded to Os4 yet, but I could be wrong.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about this.

When we started Virtualmin, we had one low-end competitor that charged slightly less (the software did quite a bit less) and three major high end competitors that were higher than ours (and have close enough to feature parity) prices by 25-50%. I figured we were right in the sweet spot for a new product: not the cheap option, since we can do a lot more than the cheap option, but a better buy than the big options.

Soon after we started, a new very low end competitor came onto the scene (about a third of our lowest initial price, and without recurring fees, while we have annual renewals). And, one of the big three high end competitors got acquired and discontinued. Same number of competitors (not counting a bunch of also ran products that aren't competitive for whatever reason), but now we're right in the middle on pricing and at the top on capability.

Since we're talking about people flying under you, I'll talk about the low end option. From what I can tell, that low end product sold about four times what we sold during the time the company existed, though revenue would have been about the same as ours during that time (because of recurring revenue). So, this company had four times the customers to support, with the same amount of resources. Of course, if you can get users helping users, this becomes less of an issue and more users is better. And, customers that are happy are a much better marketing value than buying ads or for trade show booths or whatever else.

Our situation is further complicated by the existence of Virtualmin GPL, which is the really low priced option in the market (free). Virtualmin GPL probably has about 30 times the market share of Virtualmin Professional, and is probably in third place in the market overall now (possibly fourth, but definitely gaining).

The company behind the low price option went out of business, and the low end product has since become free. Development has dropped off significantly, and its market share seems to be slowly shrinking.

In the end of all my contemplating on the subject, we've kept our pricing pretty much exactly the same: Middle of the pack, but closer to the high end than the low end. We figure the free product will mop up the really cheap folks, and when they start making money, we'll probably get some of it for a Virtualmin Professional license.

What I'm trying to say is: It's hard to know the right price. Flying under your competitors is great, if you have some significant technical advantage they don't have (like you have a web-based service vs. their installable boxed application, or you have a much simpler product that can answer the needs of a specific niche without the complexity of your competitors). But, if you're building a complicated product that has only marginal cost advantages over your competition, it's probably dangerous to significantly undercharge. Sometimes there are reasons for the prices you see.
Selling support implies that your software needs support and beyond needing it, your users need the support enough to pay for. This creates quite a disincentive to make your software intuitive.
I have an 8-core HP Z800 with 24GB RAM.

For me it's not about improving the speed of end user applications.

My usage is simple, virtualisation.

I have 6 VMs currently fired up, 1 with Oracle installed, a couple of Linux boxes to run an ESB and the remainder run SharePoint on Windows Server.

I wanted each of those to perform pretty well and not be a dev bottleneck (waiting for stuff to happen) and so I've assigned at 1+ cores per VM as well as at 2+GB RAM per VM (Oracle gets more of both). I try and balance my handing out of hardware resource to reduce the amount of scheduling that the system will have to perform between virtual machines... hence, I wanted as many cores as possible and a good chunk of RAM to go with it.

It was cheaper to buy a single high powered workstation than it was to buy 6 cheap servers. Another huge factor was that the running costs (power) and environment (heat generated in the front room + the cabling and physical space + volume in decibels) of a single workstation beat those 6 cheap boxes.
The last thing they want is a viable alternative.

A viable alternative made and sold by ... Microsoft? This wouldn't be taking away from Windows, it would be designing and selling the right tool for the job.
I prefer £800.
The problem with this is that they don't have a really solid established UI standard - or at least they make much less effort to promote or enforce it.

I've used a lot of shareware and small developer type apps on osx, windows and linux, and the osx stuff is noticeable better in the UI department; it's pretty brutal how little effort most small dev's put into the UI or even graphic design.

Even large developers have trouble creating well designed Ui's; I'm thinking of Quicken, which has always struck me as amateurish and dated though I haven't used it in a while so maybe it's improved.

Point being, if you simply put a desktop OS on a tablet, most developers aren't going to do anything to make the experience great. This is something clearly lost on Ballmer as well.
One possible application would be, I think, detection of certain materials provided that antilasers are cheap to build. In other words, cheaper replacement for spectral analysis.
A Lot of Victory is Just Walking Around
Well last time I ran windows it was win98SE, you know :) I'll go with the screencast instead.
There totally are, and while it seems like a good idea to be versed in web development there are still plenty of industries hiring folks to develop software very removed from the internet.. For instance, in my town (San Diego), there's a ton of embedded firmware positions that usual require solid CS fundamentals and experience with C.
What makes you qualified to dismiss the possibility of biochemical effects?
Multicore programming is expensive, and in violation of some very common paradigms and libraries. It takes lots of work to accomplish multicore work in a program and actually gain performance
Interesting note, one of the physicists mentioned in the article is Chong Yidong, one of the co-maintainers of emacs.
Not allowing what? Rebinding of variables? That's what IORefs, MVars etc. are for.
By the way, what is the idiomatic way to do this in Python?

(let ((x 1))
(defun less () (incf x))
(defun more () (decf x)))
Ask HN: Effectively Kickstarter-ing advice?
I got accept to Kickstarter yesterday and I'm working on putting my project together and kicking things off. I've got some ideas I think are good and I've read a lot of relevant material, but nothing beats a second perspective.

What would you make sure to do to be successful on Kickstarter? What would you avoid? Anyone willing to chat briefly, feel free to add me on Skype (minimgroup). For relevance, the project is for a humorous greeting card business. It's no diaspora, but I am passionate about it and want to be effective without "over marketing" to people or appearing manipulative.
Hello Charlie park and thanks for the reply I appreciate it.
Well some answers
From my family side I do have more family here that can help me and my wife to babysit but this can only help not be full job baby sitter.
My wife is supportive she is earning but we can’t leave only from her income. No way... is my kids small 1 year and 2 years old.
From my business side, im only in the idea phase I haven’t got any thing I haven’t got the time to code prototype. I have no time for any thing
I have full time job in the hi-tek industry. if I ever wanted to do something I defiantly will need some investment I don’t see any other way around.
For now I am single no partners. And no extra cash.
Well as you said and I was reading in the net that I need to start and go online as soon as I have something .
Some questions
How long it toke you to build the first version of your site ? How long it take it to get revenue?
Do you still work full time?
Didn't mean to criticize you. I personally found it quite enlightening to hear Graham say that every startup will eventually go through a tough phase, whether or not the business has any chance of making it -- I felt that little nugget of truth needed some attention.

Everything else I said in that post were my own words, especially the reasoning on why good friends stick it out. I find it kind of negative to simply put it on guilt -- I choose to believe that good friends work together and help each other out because they like each other, not because of fear of losing a friendship.
hacker.
One of the bigger traditional market segments for these high-end Apple desktop workstations is graphics and film processing, and the tools there have made some progress on parallelization. A bunch of Photoshop transforms and film-editing tools will happily eat up any cores you throw at them (although Photoshop has also been increasingly moving stuff to the GPU as well).
Are your proposed features for a specific mail client? I don't see one mentioned.

--

I think these could all be implemented quite easily with folders and some smart filters.

For example, snooze, just create a snooze folder and set a filter on it to move any messages in there older than <x> hours back to your inbox. Similar procedure for others.
Sure, but Venter and Celera do deserve props for introducing whole genome shotgun, which became the de facto standard for getting most of the genome.

This doesn't invalidate anything you're saying, because finishing is important, but the whole trend towards short reads and pushing more of the job to the computer was begun by Celera. Eugene Myers is/was an amazing computer scientist, and the public project would never have finished as quickly without the push from Celera.

[beat]

Also, all of this really deals with the technical aspects of obtaining a sequence, which is not really what Venter is talking about. He's saying that a good sequence isn't that useful! I'm not sure what he means with this, or whether he's just trying to be controversial.
Make yourself familiar with Perl6!
Ipods & iphones share the same apps. Windows' greatest strength is its software. If you prove that it's easy to leave, nobody knows where the customers will jump next.
Why don't issuers choose IPO auctions?
Call to check on mobile network security
We're hiring at Splunk: http://www.splunk.com/view/careers/SP-CAAAAGG
* Before the poll, maybe you could add a new paragraph that calls the user to action - "Take my poll and find out how other readers do.

* You're right, it's not your list, but it's a change you can make. Merlin Mann first raised the notion 4 years ago; Gmail's 'don't delete, archive!' has become ingrained since he published the original article. The added footnote is good though.

* How about _Inbox Zero_ [footnote-linking-to-the-'offical'-site-and-a-mention-that-its-merlin-manns-idea]?

* I was idly thinking about a UI over breakfast (as well as integrating an 'check-email-X-times-a-day'). When you go to check your email, instead of an inbox that shows old and new mail, there's just a button for 'process new mail'. Click that, and it'd show you one-by-one, new email and at the bottom, show 4 buttons with the choices, and force you to select one before moving to the next new email. (This actually looks feasible as web app for Gmail...)

* I think I'd just drop '999', but mention that it could be a good habit to always pick an auto-expiration date. (3 months of auto-expire 999, and we're almost right back where we started.) (I'd definitely like auto-expire as a feature, but thats because I also use my email inbox as a calendary reminder service as well.)

(Excuse #4 reads as a degenerate case of Excuse #1, with more procrastination and is the only excuse that applies to a 'slog' of messages)
(email me if you want to keep iterating)
Your Code Sucks
Different site, same article from hours ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1563769
Unfortunately, as I understand it, that is this where the state of the science is at. Physics can now explain most of chemical processes, but it's still unable to explain even basic biological processes.

Someone please correct me if I am wrong.
Kindle and Parochial Thinking
They should re-brand it or do a spin-off if that's the case. OK Cupid, just sounds like a dating website, and I'd assume someone with a profile on that site is merely looking for a partner.
Connexion mobile
If this included friend information it would be much more interesting.

As it stands, it's just a proof of concept.
I always expected a toaster to be first.
Machines sing the blues
This was written in 2005, but I can see at least 2-3 businesses that have cropped up since then that match the end of the "What customers want" section almost completely. He certainly knows how to find a niche.
Institutional hypocrisy enabled by wealth, part 2, gambling edition