skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IMHO you don't need to actually do coding to build a great web-app anymore. These days with the kind of tools and frameworks (springsource.com, jquery.com) and CMSs (refinerycms.com, drupal.org, firerift.com) can allow you to build a fairly powerful web app in next to no time. Couple this with the advent of Google App Engine and other cloud based app servers, the whole pain of setting up a linux server and configuring an app server on it is gone.

Already, you don't need any operational skills any more to host a production grade web-app (think load balancing, failover, etc).

The key I have realized is to depend less and less on outside technical help and more and more on yourself and your own technical tinkering abilities.

Once you've deployed your first app and have managed to get at least a few repeat users you will be surprised how many developers will be ready to help you further.

Just dive in with the implementation.. you will be surprised how much can be executed in a day by just doing it.
>>automatic field offset computations

A macro for subroutine entry could reserve stack space and define offset constants. A macro for subroutine returning releases the extra space.

It could be neat to use, if the processor architecture has sane addressing modes. (I might have seen/done something similar... doesn't feel like a new idea to me. :-) )

(The entry macro might need a simple preprocessor.)

Disclaimer: C and lower was another life, dimly remembered. :-)
>If someone wants to add Duck Duck Go to search engines in Opera, here's how (my own screenshot):

No such hackery required - it's Opera after all! There's a "Create Search" context menu these days, and it works on any text box.

In summary, just right click the search text box, click "Create Search". Even the DDG homepage says so!

I've been using it for quite some time now, but my gripe about DDG still remains; javascript should not be essential for a search engine.
Firstly, emacs is not a quick-start environment. If I want to get started in a new language, let's say Java, downloading Eclipse will make getting started with Java insanely easy. The same with C++ and Visual Studio. Compare with emacs, in which I have to spend time getting things to work. I'm not saying it's worse in the long run (although I suspect you can't beat Java on Eclipse), but the overhead every time I want to try something new is large.

But the biggest problem with emacs is the "project management" functionality. Emacs is designed to be "just an editor". To do the most simple thing, which is to define a project consisting of a few directories, and be able to move between those files, is very hard. Pick up many modern editors, and you can, with one command, point to a directory and have a project tree, a "jump to file", etc, all built for you. Not to mention the way they create makefiles automatically, do code-completion, create tag files so you can jump to a function by name, etc.

I can just list the number of things I didn't have to know about before starting emacs: makefiles, tag files, etc. Not having to worry about these kinds of things is the biggest feature emacs is lacking.
Their openness about the vulnerability is refreshing. But I assume they're only publicising the vulnerability because of the people already exploiting it.
Fair enough, upon further reflection I agree that line is a meaningless offensive generality.

I still don't get the non sequitur attack on academia.
IMO, the problem isn't with "just editing a quick file" or not.

The problem is, IDEs are amazing for everything other than editing text. This includes editing source code, mind you. I find it much easier and funner to edit code in vim, since it has so many small things that make editing code much faster.

IDEs are generally much slower for the actual act of editing code than things like vim. They're just better because of everything else they do, which (sometimes) makes up for it.

Also, most people care a lot more about all the other things like code completion than they do about the small improvement you can get by editing in vim/emacs.
"Conscious."
A comparison article on search not mentioning Bing? Yahoo and Duck Duck Go both use Bing as far as I know.
Of course there are cases when Bing is weaker than Google. For example your 'streamline/streamlining' example. (As Duck Duck Go also uses Bing of course they have the same problem).
On the other hand in other cases Bing is better than Google.

I searched for this a while ago:

'impact of basic research on GDP'

There were no relevant results on Google, and the first result was relevant on Bing. (and of course on Duck Duck Go and Yahoo, which use Bing.)

Edit: It seems that now google also gives back relevant result on my search query, so this example is not relevant anymore.
Jazz players always had subculture specific social status, same with hip-hop pioneers, early rock musicians etc.

As have gamers.
Narcissists, Insecure People Flock To Facebook
While i guess that at the moment these kind of engines are not relevant, could they be one day? They surely have their niche.
He's right though, get your idea rolling first, doesn't matter if the code is not perfect, the point is to see it working and get people interested. Later you can worry about getting it clean sharp.
Finally, something that works on flash in linux!

I jest, but flash is the perfect target if you want to hit multiple OS's. Doesn't mean the malware authors will actually develop exploits/malcode for multiple OS's though.
Is it still "private" if you give it to someone else as a gift, and they give you, at a later time, a gift of roughly equal value in return? If the answer is yes then just re-arrange all actual business to fit this model.
Sure, there are some productivity benefits of the "STFU and start writing something" part, but this post itself has a few contradicting points. If everything is wrong in some context, why should i care about writing README and tests first at all times? Say when starting a project using a new language, I don't bother writing tests because I know I'll probably revisit for a rewrite soon enough, and by then my tests will be better. It worked better for me this way. How did I know that? Hmm sometimes I stopped and asked myself what approach to take so I just STFU & take the same approach later. Oops that violated STFUDD in the first place :)
Printing your own birthday cards is not private use. 'Private use' in a legal (copyright) context is not just 'I don't directly make money from it'. Industrialized countries who have such legislation are bound by the TRIPs and Berne agreements and 'private use exemptions' are bound by, amongst other, the three-steps-test (not sure if that is the exact term in English).

Furthermore there is no such exemption for trademark or patent infringement in any legal system that I'm familiar with, but I'm happy to be proven wrong on that (it's not in my area of expertise either).
The fact that you used the word 'haven' and 'pirate' makes it sound like salty pirates on the high seas of swashbuckling adventure. Why not just say illegal file-sharers and skip the pretense?
Having checked back after a night's sleep things seem to have improved.

Phew. I thought this had turned into Reddit.
> You're building your links to call javascript, then scrambling later to find ways to make them work without.

Not exactly. I'm building JavaScript to call links, and then making sure that everything works sans JS.

I dunno why I'm catching flak for this. The display bug had nothing to do with JavaScript; it was primarily a CSS issue. The JS in that page only coincidentally fixed the CSS issue, which is exactly the kinds of backwards testing I was talking about (and obviously didn't do the last time I updated it).

See, in order for the layout to work with a minimum number of images, there's a CSS trick in some overlapping layers. The JS in the page coincidentally extends one of those layers when it inserts the fairly unobtrusive text control links that allow you to scale the page text as large or as small as is comfortable to read on your display (something the noscript folks don't even realize isn't there). Without that element, the content layer wasn't being resized correctly.

I'm on your guys' side here. I know all the "accepted ways"; I have to explain them to my clients when I justify the costs they're charged, and the benefits. Sometimes they want to know how many people this will actually affect, and I have to tell them, "maybe a few", and then try to justify doing it anyway.

And, it is harder to implement. I can build a site that will look exactly right no matter what size display you're reading it on; fonts and images will all scale, and the site will look right at 800x600 or 1600x1200, without lots of scrolling or empty space. The catch is, to do that, I need JS to work, and spending time trying to figure out the least ugly way to display the site sans JS is not "not any harder".

Feel free to browse my page source, it's fairly easy to read, if unconventional in places.
Great article.

Another example of how to achieve mass appeal, keep it simple.
That would indeed be awesome.

Google Image Search also breaks horribly with FF and Ghostery installed.

Google Instant still does horribly at my favorite test search word: Cardinal

Do they know if I'm looking for

a) the bird
b) the team
c) guy with the funny hat

? A: No.
I think the famous line from the Joker really describe startup founders who survive long enough to get a viable startup... "Whatever doesn't kill us only makes us stranger."
Zed Shaw imitation fail
Interesting and convincing. I would love to see similar studies for different kinds of games.

For example, after playing Braid for 4 hours straight, I had trouble performing normal day-to-day tasks naturally for about half an hour.
I disagree with that. We got really good tools today but writing software is still quite hard, not because of the imperfections of our tools but because the essence of software development is hard. If you're not good (yet) at coding, chances are that you will run into an insurmountable problem before you can release an initial version, unless your web app is doing something really trivial, in the technical sense.
Find out why you were rejected

Any tips on going about that? Unless you get to the interview stage you don't really get much feedback apart from any questions they ask. We have some theories of course and are trying to address them... (unproven tech, founders without much of a track record)
Visual Studio 2008 and beyond has this, and its disabled by default for VB.NET users. I'm not joking.

Something like "view advanced members" or something...
The Smarty Test Review: You think you’re smart?
If they've found it, is it still technically considered a 'zero-day' exploit?
My business, bootstrapped from nothing, has multimilion dollar revenue. It is not in a hot, web 2.0 area, yet growing all the time.

Myself and my cofounder have families, kids and enjoy healthy life/work balances.

Finally, I have no plans of living in SV. I love Cali but I hated living in the Valley.
You are supposed to get training when dealing with anything different and dangerous. Say you rock climb for the first time... and the instructor talks to you for 10 minutes about various stuff and somewhere in the middle he says: "and make sure to check that you can't see 'danger' written on the clasp of the harness, you may fall if it's not secured properly". You have lots of stuff to think about... your posture, the grip, the path you want to take... in a group of 10 people, is it really that unlikely that one will simply forget?

That's why the first couple of times somebody more experienced will check everything about your harness.
Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs
The making of video has 'lesbian porn' in the google search box on the top right.

Hilarious if it was intentional, and even more hilarious if it was unintentional.

Justin Bieber as the sole mp3 on the desktop is also funny for some reason, and LOLCATS/WAREZZZZ as the other folders.
Yes, "allegedly". This is definitely good news if it's the real thing. I wonder how long does it take to confirm it's authenticity.
great software is not (merely) built by writing code but by having a rock-solid ten-group co-founding team. But unless you'll were together in university, chances are a team would come together by looking at what each one has already done and not what each one has talked about. Not all insurmountable problems need to be solved by the founders - they can get a specialist on contract for that.

Since the OP can read and understand code, I still feel that is sufficient to get the first app out of the door.
Wait till you see what the toner cartridges are going to cost you.
YC reimburses up to $600 according to their point 2 in the apply:
http://ycombinator.com/apply.html

As another European, I would also love a European counterpart. But to me, applying to YC is not really about the money, it's about the advices, the networking and the press coverage that is hard to get when bootstrapping.
Facebook CEO Admits To Calling Users 'Dumb Fucks'
For others who like me didn't know what EBITDA meant without looking it up: "Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciations and amortization".
Off-topic, but what do you think makes public transport in Sydney so bad? You're suggesting that it's so bad that it creates a kind of built-in lateness for most events?
I think many HNers are missing the point.

This shows that building something with no profits in the hopes of getting "acquired" is not a sustainable model.

Cases like this might eventually convince big companies that acquiring startups is not that valuable after all; specially the startups that have no business model other than hoping to get acquired.

This is specially true if you (as a big company) think you're acquiring the talent (the guys who built the startup). The truth is, they will inevitable leave, because working in big companies sucks.

Building something valuable without a business model other than hoping to get acquired sounds like a scam against big companies. Basically the business model is to sell the product once for a huge sum of money, and the guy who buys the product (the big company) doesn't get anything out of it; hence the scam.

The second point is, your product (as a startup) is now dead. Doesn't that make you sad? Wouldn't you be more satisfied if users loved you and you were making money and still doing what you love?
Sometimes I am really disappointed in HN's vote quality. This comment was downvoted to 0, even though it is a perceptive call on a not very rational habit. Yet, your grandparent comment was a blanket attack, unclear and probably much wider then you intended... and it's at score 7.
Nope. FTA:

> The same thing happened when the test was switched to a similar task based on tonal differences, indicating the success of gamers wasn't simply the result of their focus on visual cues.
Not just Flash -- it's an all-platforms Flash and all-platforms Reader vulnerability plus the Flash exploit for Windows in the wild!

I beleive we can soon expect Reader exploits too.
Vibram Five Fingers Classic Vibram
If I agree to meet someone at a certain time, I make sure I arrive early so as not to keep them waiting. I'd rather arrive early and wait, then arrive late and keep the other person waiting.

That is the only polite way to behave when meeting up with somebody.
Sounds as if the desktop was carefully prepared for the video.
For three reasons:

* We don't make the kind of software YC is interested in

* We don't need the money

* We're not in the US
Also, if an event finishes at a set time of say 8pm, and I'm being picked up. I don't tell the person to pick me up at 8pm. I add maybe 10 minutes on top to make sure I'm out and ready and waiting when they arrive.
Craigslist to tell Congress why it cut adult ads
The problem of people not getting money.
Apparently not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-day_attack

> A "zero day" attack occurs on or before the first or "zeroth" day of developer awareness
Here's Why Twitter Apps Are Such Lousy Investments
Just wondering, what is the best way to set up the game loop - simply setTimeout?

I have considered if it would be worthwhile to try putting the logic into a web worker and trigger update events to the display. Then again, sending an event from the worker to the UI thread will probably be scheduled the same way as a setTimeout event.

It's just that setTimeout seems rather slow. I have created a game with AI in Javascript, which runs fine with web workers. I tried to make it work without workers by frequently interrupting the AI thread with setTimeout events, and it was a lot slower.
"if your company's name includes the words 'tweet' or '140' in it, you're f---ed."
Rapid Product Development for Project Managers
There are at least two interpretations of probability. Firstly the epistemological, as you say, represents our lack of knowledge about the world. Secondly the aleatory truly represents the phenomenon of chance in the world.

The best interpretation of quantum theory for example (as I understand it) takes the latter view that randomness is genuinely physically manifested, and does not simply represent our inability to model reality.
Someone needs to make every file exists into an NZB, with RARs and PARs.

Personally, i still maintain thats the best method of downloading large content at full speed with a built-in mechanism for error-checking
To be fair, these things happen to many other platforms. Adobe's no exception. Two weeks seems a bit on the slow side from our hacker point of view, but it is in line with what you tend to get from large corporations (and actually fairly responsive... this would be a good response time for, say, Internet Explorer - and Flash has more installs on a much wider variety of OSes and hardware than IE).

Let's not all gang up on Adobe just because they're, well, just as bad as everyone else.
Safari OS X users, may I recommend ClickToFlash for the time being.

http://clicktoflash.com/
I think that we are heading for the democratisation of manufacturing, and it will be an amazing time when it gets into full swing. The current manufacturing powerhouses (e.g. China) will fade out and give way to on-demand local production and this will have a truly revolutionary effect on society. Exciting times; I hope I live to see it come to fruition.

I agree that Open Source will ultimately play a pivotal role in this revolution and it will eat away at the status quo of 'things' much as it has been doing with software for last 20 years. This will inevitably clash with the old established businesses with the same predictable results, but this too shall pass. As the saying goes, science makes progress one funeral at a time and so does society. With any luck the next generations will look back on our current attitudes to IP and regard them as archaic and curious.
Newsweek in 1995: Why the Internet will Fail.
Scheduling a meeting at 9am is also rather inconsiderate towards me. Besides, why don't you just start without me? By scheduling it at 9am, you have made it clear that my attention is not really important to you.
Fixing wysiwyg content, front-end style
How To Lose Weight 
Determination – You are either heading to perform it successfully or perhaps you may likewise not even start, are you fully commited in order to shedding weight? Do you really, really want to do it?
To be less cryptic:

The predictions the article hints at especially in the conclusion are the predictions of Marx. Decentralized, low-cost, self-replicating, manufacturing robots are one of the most disruptive technologies are economy will ever face. The means of production will be in the hands of all individuals and the economy will evolve into a completely different state than today's service economy. An economic evolution from agrarian -> manufacturing -> service -> techno-marxism. Economies will naturally evolve to the point where producer and the worker are indistinguishable from one another.

(This is in no way shape or form a post supporting leninism\communism\maoism. There is no way to skip the prerequisite steps of economic evolution and technological development through prescriptive action)
there, there.
Why not?

If you set a loss limit with your broker, when you hit it they'll automatically sell all your shares and just leave the money in your account.
The lesson is still the same though: Deliver a simple HTML page to the client that can be viewed correctly and in full without scripting or CSS turned on. Then, optionally, use scripting to enhance what's already there.

By doing it any other way, you run into the issues you're running into.
Here's one: I often google for Oracle and Python. I sometimes get articles about Apollo, Pythia and Delphi.
Game Theory, Salary Negotiation, and Programmers
Analogy failure.

You can't just compare two things that on the surface may vaguely seem the same, and just assert they are the exact same thing.

Dyslexia is a recognized medical (psychological?) condition. Being chronically late is just rudeness, plain and simple. If you constantly lose track of the time, buy a watch. Set an alarm. Use a smartphone with a calendar that will remind you of things. Take responsibility for your actions and don't try to excuse the inexcusable as some sort of "condition."
Two years? Yeah, because the whole world has cheap access to 10 Mbaud internet connection.
Reasons we're not: a) My cofounder has a family and can't move to SF for the season. b) We have more than a YC amount of cash on hand already.

Reasons we should anyway: a) Connections. b) Exposure. c) Connections.
Sydney is strange that way, populated largely by people doing very little and thus the idea of being particularly concerned about punctuality strikes them as novel, and yet there are still quite a few bastions of people who steadfastly refuse to just meander along with the herd.

These two segments of the local population always seem to grate on one another, this is a good case study of exactly how.
It's creepier than you think - ever since it began making suggestions, long before Google Instant, Google has been quietly logging things you didn't search for.
I feel like that's a bit less severe and not really the same thing. For an open-ended party, people will trickle in as they feel like it, and no harm is done. For 8pm dinner reservations, one is expected to arrive and be ready to be seated by 8pm, for example.
I'm not sure virtualization helps that much - you might gain by limiting the impact of one malware outbreak but then you end up with so many more OS guest instances kicking about that it becomes increasing difficult to partition these sensibly and monitor what is going on.

Add complications like potential Blue Pill threats and it all gets rather scary.
Dividing one 32-bit number by another is a constant-time operation even if on some machines (e.g. ARM) it is implemented as a loop. This is what matters. Raising a number to the nth power is an O(log n) operation.
Those are interpreters, not compilers.
This didn't happen to me, but that's only because I set up dozens of post-its and alarms reminding me to quit those tests I was running on EC2. That's perhaps the one web-service that has made me the most paranoid.
Neither have I, but I think its still much too soon to reuse the word. I think it'll be a few more years yet before people disassociate burn with writing to optical media.
re: (4) - an anecdotal example does not imply intent.

Wufoo is a good PR case for YC in that it has contributed to the startup ecosystem a sustainable, profitable company that creates value. It's good to see.

However, YC cannot survive on happy thoughts. The fund and LPs need to see big returns for the wheel to keep turning, and growing happy sustainable businesses doesn't move the needle enough.

Realistically, YC probably needs to push out a mix of sustainable companies for good ecosystem PR, and a handful of home-runs that keep the LPs happy and the fund financially viable. To say that Wufoo is an "example" of YC's backing of neat sustainable businesses is to see half the picture.