skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reminds me of Roller Coaster Tycoon, the customers say stuff like "This park is a really good value" and you bump your entrance fee until they stop saying it. Except in the real world people rarely tell you your your product is too cheap.
> A movie star elected governor by Hollywood- California really is crazy!

I guess you've never heard of Ronald Regan:)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan
The founders already did quit, right?
Good timing, just days after announcing a deal with Facebook :-)
If only I could get @avi for myself as easily as I got @paulg for Paul.
I don't see why. While everyone you want to talk to is on Facebook you talk Facebook. When a group of friends you want to privately share with is largely on Diaspora, you use Diaspora. Diaspora's focus on making setting privacy levels unthinkingly sounds like it'd be a real useful thing to have hooked into Facebook [for people who give a shit about privacy, but not enough to fight Facebook settings afresh each post].

Embrace, extend and ...
If you look at the iPhone, the two most important parts were acquired too. WebKit used to be KDE's KHTML and multitouch was acquired too. And all the cool apps were done by Google.
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Doesn't this imply that _nothing_ is always perfection. The quote just seems to be flat out wrong.

While maybe not as elegant, but wouldn't it be better said as "Perfection is achieved, not where is nothing more to add, but when there is neither more to add nor anything to take away".

Maybe the quote has a proceeding sentence that makes it clear.
Wow I don't think I have seen follows grow by double digits live before. Might be a first. At 4pm was just over 300
New media vs. old.

Conde Nast can retaliate somehow, but then all the users just get mad and go to the competitors, and Reddit becomse a Distant Memory Of The Past.
Yes, that's actually close to another way of implementing it. But you can't just blindly assign the scope of baz to foo and bar, because foo and bar might have local variables of their own. Another issue is that baz might have local variables that aren't used in foo and bar, so when baz returns you want the garbage collector to be able to reclaim that storage (otherwise it could lead to arbitrary space leakage if these variables point to large structures). You need a tree structure of environments in the general case.
How did you do it? Just emailed the owner?
Ever heard of CSS sprites? The initial load of the mic-off image and the like could easily be avoided.
Octopus ain't free, you know.
You should post a plot of it somewhere 8-)

(That's not creepy, is it?)
You could have seen even more digits: http://twitter.com/billgates
Why would the GPL have been a "no-no" for carriers? Linux is GPL'd, and I'm pretty sure Android uses that.

I can't think of a single Android device that doesn't let you install your own build on it. (After some coercing, of course.)
I have to admit I haven't read the books, lower head in shame. It was too expensive when I was a poor student. Interestingly years later at work there were some Romanian exchange students doing summer internship. When they left, we bought gifts for them. A coworker and I bought the 3rd Volume to give to one of them. That really made her day.
Digg: Labored
Some of the 600 best friends you'll ever have! ;)
How'd you get paulg?
I dislike the pejorative title. Google isn't "bailing", which has a negative connotation. They are being sued and the number of potential conflict of interests that could occur by having their employees at JavaOne in an official capacity are high. It is in their best interest at this point to avoid the conference, although I imagine many of their java developers will still attend in a non-official capacity.
Most things that are worthwhile have an up-front cost/learning curve. To dismiss something just because you have to take the time to learn about it first is a ridiculous concept.

Personally I have the 'escape' mapped to the back-tick (`), and if I need to send an actual back-tick then I just hit it twice (``). I ripped this setup off from someone on StackOverflow.
The day after, in fact.
In Life of Brian Pythons elaborate on this question:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uMJYQ9LKGQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zjz16xjeBAA
Yes, SpiderOak does, but I'm talking about the ones being complained about.
Don't forget "anti-semitic". And before anyone even has the audacity to say "it's anti-Israel, not anti-semitic", this: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/ccnir/im_gonna_get...
I hope he didn't put a real email address on his twitter account cause that just got flooded ;p
@avibryant works at Twitter.
Yep, that's how closures are implemented. Changing your mental model of programming from stack based to what you could call "lexical scope based" is what's difficult here yes.
Hmm. Twitter needs tab completion.
I doubt almost any twitter posting would be in-depth enough for me to consider it HN worthy.
Are you sure you're not quoting a Simpsons episode?

Better than that, I'm 100% sure I was. Facetious comment was for the lulz, but it seems people enjoyed having the joke explained so it's all good :-)
That seems like a cromulent observation to me.
165 University Ave: Silicon Valley's 'lucky building'
Typically developers complain the other way round - that employers don't believe they could be able to pick up any other skill than the ones already on their CV.

I still think PHP is basically ASP for Perl - sorry... (Yeah I've heard people claim it is not like Perl at all).
Now if only we can get a way to claim inactive usernames when we aren't famous ..
And PeepOpen if you're on a Mac and using MacVim http://peepcode.com/products/peepopen
Pretty sure http://twitter.com/oprah was well in the 6 digits in her first day.
Often you can still learn some things from the interviews. A glimpse into differing company cultures, for examples.
The assumption is that you're talking about some thing - design, work of art, whatever - which is accomplishing some goal. The perfection lies in removing extraneous elements without stopping it from achieving the goal. Nothing, by itself, doesn't achieve much.
A Witty Phrase Proves Nothing

- Voltaire

The point of the quote (to me at least) was to be taken more to inspire you to rethink perfection then to be taken literally at face value.
I wonder how many are people, and how many are followbots.
Resilience. They can endure misfortunes without becoming discouraged.
"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler" [Einstein] is my favorite quote of all time.
I remember following PG long time ago.. and then finding out he was a fake.
He should use identi.ca :)
it's been a while so I don't remember the specifics but it was code for dealing with json in a lift code base.
At our company, there are a lot of internal bindings for vim and emacs. You can hit a key combo, and have vim/emacs determine the base class of the perl module you're working on, and open in up in a new buffer. You can hit a key combo to open up the test module for the current module. You can hit a key combo to run the unit test that you're working on, etc.

Vim also has the 'gf' (go-to-file) keybinding while goes to the file under the cursor. It does a good job of being language specific when it needs to be. For example, if the 'file' is a perl module or java package/class it will convert "Text::Utils" or "text.utils" to text/utils{.pm,.java} and search for it in the comma separated list of paths in the &path variable (i.e. :set path). Vim auto-magically imports the perl path @INC or java path into &path (though weird local configurations aren't auto-detected, and you'll just have to write something to inject those paths into &path).

Vim also has things like NERDTree and LustyExplorer that make navigating a dev tree pretty easy.
Still, even your explanation is wrong. There are obviously times when adding something is required. If a car with no engine, I need to add one. I can't simply remove a wheel.
Why is this so mysterious? It looks exactly like you'd expect an oblique-angle impact would (and the article speculates that it is the most likely cause).
Surprising that it took this long. PG's quotes page includes several by "Tara Ploughman", an anagram for "Not Paul Graham". When this was discovered, PG lamented the lack of a socially acceptable way to publish "single sentence essays". Twitter fills the gap nicely.
New location based community networking tool for the iPhone released
There's a neat new iphone application called local questions that i've just released it's free and contains no advertisements.

it's more of a conceptual test/experiment sort of thing

Have you ever wanted to ask questions to folks in the same general area as you?

Well now you can, find answers to yours questions quickly and easily by asking other folks in the nearest zipcode.

users of the application will be alerted to your questions and replies via a push notifications.
I prefer LustyExplorer. The only downside is that they both require ruby support in Vim (some some of our work servers vim only has perl and python scripting support).
Be still my throbbing heart

(down-vote me all you want, this title was hero-worship lame)
Insight, "Digg: Labored"
The problem I have with the quote is that it makes me think he took away too many words. To make the quote perfect, he needs to add some words. And maybe he realized that too, but would be a hypocrite if he did so. :-)
Honestly I'm not sure why they bothered even announcing that ;) Isn't JavaOne an official Oracle sponsored dealio?
If I had thought of that earlier it would have been useful, but I did not save the timestamps, sorry!

That would have been an interesting experiment to do.
This post is pretty much information-free.

This seems to be his only criticism of the product, and it isn't even correct:

>It is interesting to think about all the internal discussions and time spent implementing features like character-by-character typing without anyone bothering to ask whether that feature actually makes sense for a product that is billed as a replacement to email.

This was explicitly thought about. The reason this feature was included was to fix the latency of chatting. The perceived problem is that most of the time people spend chatting is waiting for the other person to finish typing. No one quite knew what sort of social effects this would have, but by taking a poll they would have just built a "faster horse."
Excluding the most populous country on the planet seems more than a mere oversight...
The OP seems comfortable with the 100K-1M euro range. Do I understand the work involved? I am not a "business guy" but it looks to me like:

(1) is where potential is

(2) salary requirements

(3) negotiation

(4) paperwork

Having something of value should I retain a lawyer? At the hint of a possibility of a sale and regardless of real offers?
While this may not be a concern for many startups at the moment, while I was job hunting I found the about us page to be very helpful in weeding out companies I should stay away from. I.e. the more bullshit they added in their about us, the less likely I was to investigate further to decide if I should attempt to apply there or not. So maybe something to keep in mind for the future is realize potential customers probably won't care about the "about us" page, and tailor the page more for people who are actually trying to learn something about your company.
This meme wasn't getting traction after it was pointed out that welfare, as commonly envisioned, doesn't even exist in the United States. Seems to be being retried as cigarettes and food stamps. Let's see if that one sticks.
What Does The Google-Verizon Proposal Mean?
Damn. What an alarming medium.
as he already said, it has to accomplish some goal, if your goal is for your car to drive, it needs an engine.
Sorry to be alarmist/morbid, but what happens to tarsnap if you suddenly disappear/die?
http://twittercounter.com/paulg should do that, although its not updated yet
I think I meant where you are at the moment, as I get the impression that hackers often move to where the work is. But good point - I should have been clearer. :-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uMJYQ9LKGQ

it's just so funny how they use the same verb for it. God bless Pythons for Life of Brian!

"I'M NOT THE MESSIAH!!!"
"Well I say you are and I should know, I've followed a few."
http://www.dailywritingtips.com/free-rein-or-free-reign/

It's not a metaphor about monarchs, but about horses ... but I guess nobody knows what those are anymore.
I just creamed off the top five countries from my google analytics data. Completely arbitrary - but I thought not completely irrelevant, as only people interested in programming would be likely to visit my site. Maybe I should have thought a bit harder...?
The best source of information is in the vim docs. I also found that to be true of the python bindings as well. Google doesn't do as good of a job as the vimdocs do (probably because most people the whip stuff up using the bindings publish their code as vimscripts/plugins/etc instead of writing blog posts about it).

Ruby => http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/if_ruby.html
Python => http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/if_pyth.html
Wonder how many of those followers are real and how many are spam...
I thought it was going to be the origin of Force Quit on a Mac, but perhaps that already existed at the time.
Is this kind of experimentation feasible for expensive products targeted at businesses? A product that costs $300 a month. It would seem dangerous to try this and get bad press and angry customers. The problem is (1) people know how much it cost before, it's not impulse buying (2) one business might decide to buy a second license and notice that the price has doubled.

So, is there a way out?
So much for the stealth approach I guess ;)

The interesting part is not who follows you, but who you follow.
OK, put a lawnmower engine in a Hummer... Now this simply becomes an exercise in requirements gathering. Because your retort will be the goal is this accerlation curve, this torque curver, this gas mileage, etc....

And this presumes that the requirements lead to perfection. What is the goal of the Mona Lisa or Dante's Inferno? Could Micaelangelo have done less to satisfy the requirements for the Creation of Adam?

Can you point to any value in that quote?

And let me extend my last question. How many things can you list that would be perfect merely by removing things? I don't think there are many. I suspect most things, that even accomplish a goal, lack perfection due to an array of things, not simply due to having too much of anything.
Monad terminology problem
s/Designer/MBA/
you are welcome HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1632531
My mistake! I knew about Regan, but I didn't know he was a Cali guvner first.
I'm in the UK and went through a similar situation 3 years ago (minus the being hired part). I wrote about it here: http://peterc.org/blog/2010/257-three-years-ago-i-sold-my-st...

While I think "get a lawyer" is good advice, I managed fine without (I'm no lawyer but I've studied law and have a good eye for legal jargon and contract wordplay). I think having financial advice is, perhaps, a better first step. Depending on how your "startup" is formed will depend on how you can sell it and how any proceeds would be taxed (or not). You may not even need to pay any taxes due to entrepreneur's relief (if you're in the UK.)

Ultimately, you'll also do well to use escrow - a third party who gets the money before you send anything of serious value to the buyer. This is the sort of stuff your legal advisor will talk to you about, unless you're doing it solo (I had a good idea about how to progress just from avid self-reading on the topic of acquisitions).

Legal representation and a visit would be particularly wise if the deal is contingent on you working for them afterward. After all, they may structure the deal in a way where you're indentured to them or only get certain shares of the cash after certain time periods. This could be complex and would benefit from legal advice on your side. If it were a simple "we'll pay X for Y" deal, that's a different kettle of fish.

You also need to be aware of visa issues if you need to work on-site. If the acquisition is sizable enough and you are established enough, they may be able to get you in an O-1 visa, especially if they'll pay you handsomely. But they need to be paying for that process and you need that in the contract ;-)
That has been my experience - that a significant number of people who write code for a living are not aware of what's been happening on the Internet the last half dozen years.

That or they are really lazy.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb (author of The Black Swan) uses Twitter for exactly that purpose: http://twitter.com/nntaleb "(I use twitter to test philosophical aphorisms/epigrams)."
Here in Colorado it's very informal; it's just not the norm to wear a suit to an interview. It raises eyebrows. This is especially true for tech jobs. I would never not hire someone because of this, but the reality is I've never met anyone that over-dressed like that for an interview that aced it. If they did, I'd probably joke with them about the suit, but that would be that.

I also personally find suits unoriginal. It's actually more work to find a nice outfit that is stylish, professional and looks good; a suit is like choosing Pad Thai at a Thai restaurant - it's just the easy choice, not necessarily the best choice (though sometimes it is the best choice too). I also think ones appearance gives you a glimpse into what makes them unique; if I'm meeting you to consider hiring you then your appearance matters. It won't be the reason I hire you, or not hire you, but it matters. Sorry if that bothers you.
I think it is cool his web tweets are "via web"... very close to viaweb...
Ask HN: How do you demo and sell your product/service?
What tools are you using on your site to demo it?

Screencast? Video? Animation?
Stills?
Just text?

A combination of all of those?

What is most effective for you?
So you want to read about companies with no competitive advantages anywhere in the organization? Maybe some big firm that uses its marketshare to enforce a significant amount of revenue as opposed to better handling of operations, marketing, R&D, customer support, sales, etc?
The interesting part would have been the first couple of hours.

After a week it's neat but no longer as interesting because you can't really see how fast the news spreads within seconds of making an announcement like this. I really am a dunce for not timestamping.
Any idea when the process to claim inactive accounts is going to be fixed? My startup owns the domain associated with its name (which is pretty unique), but someone is squatting the relevant Twitter account without any activity. I already contacted Twitter but they said basically they can't do a thing unless I trademark the name, which is cost-prohibitive.
This does resonate with me. Thank you.
To: Ignorant debian developer.

Subject: RVM is better then the shit you got in your repo

Ruby and especially rubygems in debian are so braindead that lots (most?) of people that choose debian for its other great features have to compile their own rubies and gems.
RVM solves a real pain, while Debian ruby/gems packages only inflict more of it.
That's it. You people have stood in my way long enough. I'm going to clown college.
"In a large enough population of data, collisions [of cryptographic hash values] happen."

True, but this does not happen in practice. Using SHA-1 as an example hash function, you'd need about 10^24 different files before you would expect a 50% chance of a collision. You are not going to come anywhere near this limit, 10^24 different files have not been created during the entire span of human history.
That's either pretty prescient or they followed your suggestion to the letter.
> Why would the GPL have been a "no-no" for carriers?

Because carriers are staggeringly stupid, I think.

> I can't think of a single Android device that doesn't let you install your own build on it.

I wish that were true: "Unlike the DROID, the Milestone has a bootloader that only allows signed Firmware to load. This prevents users from booting Custom ROM images not signed by Motorola that have become popular in the Droid modding community."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Droid#Motorola_Milesto...

Many Motorola phones are similarly restricted. Did I mention carriers are phenomenally stupid?
I thought GDocs was in development before that?
Get pg's tweets pushed to your phone with Push.ly and Notifo :)
yea, anyone who has ever done differentiation or messed with probabilities involving random variables has played with 'higher order functions'.
TechCrunch runs out of post ideas, re-purposes HN submission
There is risk because users may find out and be less than impressed by it.
Unlikely since natural transformations are a statement on how a particular collection of functions behave under composition.
http://google.com/ vs http://yahoo.com/
Nope, I'm 43 (yeah who let the old guy in here???).

Maybe it's because I'm 43 that I have the opposite view of this; growing up in the 80's and seeing what kind of people wore suits (aka the 'greed is good' crowd), that probably had a negative affect on me. There is also Dr. Johnny Fever (WKRP anyone?) and his compelling 'Suits Versus the Dungarees' argument (sorry couldn't resist an obscure 80's ref...).

But I want to STRESS I would never not hire or hire someone based on this - I just think ones appearance helps give you another factor at evaluating a potential hire.
The fundamental problem is that a large amount of possible government action is hampered by a constitutional rule that says that 60% of the house has to agree on any budget. Structurally neither party has the power to get to 60% of the state legislature, voting for taxes is political suicide for Republicans, and voting to cut benefits is political suicide for Democrats. So we have permanent deadlock with no attempted solutions being politically viable.

With your example, if California tried that before declaring bankruptcy, there would be court challenges that California would lose. Even if contracts going forward were amended, that wouldn't help the structural problems from what has already happened.

Therefore California requires either bankruptcy or extraordinary assistance. And the Obama administration has indicated that no extraordinary assistance will be forthcoming.

It is worth noting here that California is one of the few states that pays more into the federal government than we get out, and the amount extra we have paid in over the years is more than enough to rescue the state government.
I use a screen session w/ multiple windows at work on the server, which I attach to every morning. Then I have all of the setup that I was working on the previous day right there in front of me.

Some screen hacks:

* I use grabssh[1] so that I can get ssh-agent forwarding working again when I reattach. ssh into the server, run grabssh, then reattach the screen session. Now all of my shells in the session can source fixssh to update their environment.

* I also use a wrapper for ssh within a screen session:

function screen_ssh_wrapper()
{
if [ -n "$STY" ]; then
HOST=$(echo "$1" | sed -e 's,[a-zA-Z0-9],,g')
if [ -z "$HOST" ]; then
# Note: We need all of these vars b/c we want the ssh command to
# inherit them from the current shell, and *not* from screen (for
# long-running screen sessions, those values may be out of date)
screen -t "$1" \
env \
SSH_CLIENT="$SSH_CLIENT" \
SSH_TTY="$SSH_TTY" \
SSH_AUTH_SOCK="$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" \
SSH_CONNECTION="SSH_CONNECTION" \
DISPLAY="$DISPLAY" \
ssh "$@"
return
fi
fi
ssh "$@"
}
alias ssh='screen_ssh_wrapper'

[1] http://samrowe.com/wordpress/ssh-agent-and-gnu-screen/
Venmo.com launches 100% new site... looks amazing
Nice article.

"I had a good idea about how to progress just from avid self-reading on the topic of acquisitions"

Maybe you can suggest some reading materials?