skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Its interesting, because having worked at a startup for 3-4 years as my first job I'm looking to move into banking or a larger company where I can continue learning. A startup is great, the environment is brilliant and I love the people. I learned a lot in a very short period of time. I however have escalated to the top of the food chain in my area with no where to go. We have a limited budget and do not face scaling problems anymore. Moving to a larger company makes sense. Working with 500-1000 servers and the tools to manage them is experience I definitely need.

Both startups and banking have their advantages. Everyone should try gain experience in both.
I think many of the use cases you list on the front page are a bit of a stretch. The To Do list for example, there's already hundreds of different ways people keep their to do lists, and I can't see any advantage of keeping one here over my own way. You might want to consider distilling down the use cases to a handful if not one or two very strong use cases and focus on those. It's much harder to market to everyone rather than specific user types. If you try to speak to everyone, the message gets very watered down, but if you try to speak to one specific user type, i.e. Moms, the message is direct and relevant.
Firstly, if capacity is a problem, there really shouldn't just be a single elevator serving this supposedly "large" building. But since a lot of places can't afford all the elevators they need... you know how a full bus will just ignore everyone at a bus stop, and only stop when someone wants off? Elevators know when they're full.
> He would be doing something immoral if he didn't do what was best for Microsoft

Look how loved the company is today. Was what he did really the best he could have done for Microsoft? Wouldn't a kinder, gentler Microsoft, one that helped a healthy market thrive, be better? Would the smaller slice of a larger pie be larger than Microsoft's current pie?

> they get a job in finance doing nothing of benefit to society

I suppose you assume VCs exist in a vacuum. No.

> He helped bring computers to the masses.

No. Jobs and Wozniak did. Jack Tramiel did. Gates did nothing like that.
I incidentally find http://www.colourlovers.com and specifically http://www.colourlovers.com/web/trends very useful in the design process
I thought Qt apps that ran on symbian and Meego was a fairly good idea (and bold since they'd previously been Gnome-centric on Linux).
I'd agree. Then I remember Clippy.
Django Patterns: Pluggable Backends
so expensive though for casual personal use...
As of today, Sr. is also advocating an income tax on individual Washington State residents earning over $200K. Currently, WA has no income tax on residents.

Source: http://www.ballardnewstribune.com/2010/09/15/news/bill-gates... (includes some very interesting figures)
> Like the dinosaurs, it was a time of mainframes. Then everyone can do it, welcome to the PC world.

It seems you missed the years when the first S-100 personal computers appeared, the time when they ran CP/M, the Apple II, the Commodores, the Ataris... IBM-PCs were introduced in 1981 and didn't became as important as they are today until they were successfully cloned, a couple years later. Basically, you just skipped the 70's. And the minicomputers where VMS (the granddaddy of NT) and Unix were born.
Reminds me of the comment about people not knowing what the real game being played is. They think the rules are a certain way when in fact reality has a very different set that they are incapable of operating within. They faced innovation outside the technical arena and got beat. Then they want to complain about the 'rules.'
When faced with a problem too large to solve divide it in to two roughly equal halves.

Pick the first half of the two and see if you can solve it.

If not recurse with the first half, else solve it.

Now look at the other half and see if you can solve it.

if not recurse with the second half, otherwise solve it.

For debugging it mostly relates to chopping up the program in to bits that are 'verified good' and 'unsure', until you are literally staring at the bug.

Some sort/search algorithms are an almost literal implementation of divide-and-conquer.

edit: the more I think about this the more I realize that this has pervaded in to just about everything that I do. I'm currently rebuilding a car that has crashed and I find I use divide and conquer to troubleshoot and to repair. Tomorrow I'll be puling the engine to replace a cracked gearbox casing and for sure I'll use it again, both to remove the engine, to remove and replace the gearbox and to put the whole thing back together again, one small 'obvious' step at a time.

edit2: see also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1695794
"Every single line of code you write will probably solve a problem and will introduce at least one bug"

I believe that sort of extreme skepticism is helpful in writing solid code and thinking about unintended consequences.
I would point to Ataris, Amigas, Transputers, RISC workstations, Lisp Machines, Xerox Star, Connection Machines, supercomputers, ... Not to mention the software that would be developed today if we weren't stuck with glorified 8080s running 60's OSs (Linux is Unix and NT is VMS)...
Interesting that people are complaining about the "hardware first" side of Nokia, since in the good old days of monochrome screens and phones that made phone calls Nokia always had the best (ie easiest to use) user interface out there.
No sign of a SDK for it yet that I can find, unfortunately.
I think HN may be getting a little more reactionary -- both more quick to upvote and more quick to downvote. I've noticed that some of my comments get far more upvotes then they're worth and also some unexplainable downvotes.

This comment(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1695010), for example, seems on-topic but was downvoted pretty quickly.
That summarizes it :
"Only a sucker would sit and hope for recognition".

Google tries to avoid the unavoidable, at least in astrophysics :

"After the type II supernova, only the collapsed core is left behind. If it's less than 2 or 3 solar masses, it is what's known as a neutron star, named thus because it's made almost entirely of degenerate neutrons."
I personally think a strong mathematics background is under-rated, and it is uncommon for self-taughts to have one (speaking as one with that background). Of course, even a lot of CS grads don't have the kind of mathematics background I would espouse.

It's not about the specific mathematical techniques, but the general way of thinking.
depending on the state and the type of service you offer, you are responsible for the data on your systems. allowing users to upload arbitrary encrypted data may be a foolish and potentially costly policy.

this is one reason why many services don't allow users to upload arbitrary data
I figured MSFT's reign of terror was from the mid 80s to the early '00s, then rounded up as a courtesy.
I honestly had a fairly positive reaction to the design. The rainbow color scheme feels fresh and modern to me. The mozilla page you posted is exceptionally well done, but not as visually interesting, in my opinion.
Looks like the freemium model for web hosting/construction. I have to agree with some other comments stating the staring templates are needed. People new to site construction will see the blank sites as too much, like when you give someone 25 choices to buy jams, they don't buy any. But if you give them 5 choices of jam, they are more likely to buy something.

Guide their design process a bit and they will grow their Orbs enough for it to really take shape.
Why a throwaway?
Demo of IE9-enhanced Bing Search Experience
> and has probably helped his fellow man more than any single individual on the planet.

I was with you until that point. Gates didn't help anyone before helping himself. It's easy to be altruistic, to "do the right thing" with a billion dollars in the bank. I know a lot of businessmen that would not consider entering the kind of shady plans he devised to further Microsoft's (and his own) interests. Those are the real heroes: the people who work, create and strive to win in the market by creating superior solutions for the problems people have, not by striking deals with OEMs that restrict what kind of product end-users will be able to buy.

Also, don't forget that Gates didn't really risk everything (like so many entrepreneurs do). He had his family to back him up. I bet he would have a cozy job waiting for him if Microsoft failed.
I have used MPDF given the limitations of the shared server I am using. But I would definitely give a try to your extension.
funny use of colour:

http://www.gursimran.com/showcase
Where the Poor Go
There was a story not long ago on HN (can't seem to find it though) about a blogger who had a special Twitter pipeline to send tweets whenever he blogged, or something.

The thing failed silently and stayed broken for two months, and NOBODY NOTICED: neither he nor any of his "followers" (he had more than a thousand).

So, having found out about the situation, he decided to stop using Twitter altogether.

On LinkedIn I now have to see all the tweets of my "contacts" whenever I log in; this is so annoying that it may push me to quit LinkedIn for this reason alone.

People on Twitter are just copying and pasting news found elsewhere; there is an infinitely small proportion of original content: for one "Shit My Dad Says", there are millions of users who only mulch old content from the likes of Digg (RIP) or Reddit or HN.

Twitter users are not paying attention to one another; they shout in the desert and nobody cares.

This cannot go on forever.
It's more subjective then ironic I think.
okay jacques - you say in your post that in this case, you would have not only fired the employee, but "charged" them.

well first of all, it is law enforcement that charges people

secondly, charge them with what? any site that allows you to upload data is going to have users sign a user-agreement that stipulates examination by company employees (to do otherwise would be insane).

in this case one could suggest that the engineer was stalking...thats one thing. but to suggest that db admins seeing what is in a row of data is somehow illegal is insane
I would like to know what % of your startups already had a working prototype in beta before they applied? Do you prefer more who just have an idea instead of a platform already? What are the pros and cons of each? Thanks.
Ask HN: Does YC want startups to exit, or generate dividends?
It seems that acquisitions of technology startups frequently kill the startup, disperse talent when the employment contracts expire, and ultimately result in an accounting write-off.

If these exits are common to a market, I can understand that such a market would encourage sellers to take advantage of them, especially if dividends are not forthcoming, as long as the selling price of such startups exceeds their intrinsic value and cost to the seller. Such sellers are entitled to be in the business of selling businesses, and where there is a buyer, let there be a seller.

But I believe it is also possible to be in the business of business, to invest in a business as a going concern, in order to receive a dividend, to retain one's share in a business as long as it remains a good business, and to fix it where not.

I would like to think that the best technology startups have proved to be good businesses. I would also like to think that dividends and equity appreciation win over short sells.

Hypothetically speaking, if a startup I knew where to apply to YC, and if the startup were interested in building a technological business like HP or IBM or Boeing or GE, would YC be a good fit?

Regardless of market conditions, would YC be more likely to encourage its startups to exit, or generate dividends?
>On the other hand, anthropogenic global warming is a matter of degree.

Yes, few informed people would disagree. The problem, however, is with how the debate is presented to the public. Watching CNN or MSNBC someone would come away with the impression that the debate is between the political conservative position (either wait and see, or it's not a problem), and the IPCC.

In reality, the scientific debate is centered around the IPCC[1], with some scientists being more conservative in future projections, and some being more dire. The scientific uncertainty that you speak of cuts both ways, and could also end up revealing a nightmare scenario of climate feedbacks. See:http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/roulette-0519.html

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107.full...
Q already exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(programming_language)
So, I encounter a lot of programmers that have read a little and consider themselves to really know what they're talking about. However, they can't explain how an index works - not even in simple terms. Like, if I'm looking for someone with the username 'johnnygood', why would indexing the username column make that lookup faster? Even a very simplistic answer like, "an index orders the information so that the database server can jump to that record binary-search style rather than looking through every row" would be wonderful.

In that light, I think that programmers should know the basics of computer science: what references are; how a linked list works; a little about tree data structures; stacks, queues; basic sorting and searching stuff; etc. I'm not saying that you need to be able to talk about everything off the top of your head. I just think a familiarity with the theoretical concepts is good.

On the other end, I see a lot of people who know that PHP interprets strings using single quotes faster than double quotes, but have no idea why NoSQL might scale better (and might actively think it's because of the SQL language).

I want someone to say "a lot of the NoSQL technologies work by having you pre-compute data so that your data structures have the information you want to display together stored together in a structure that can be read more quickly like a hash." It isn't magic.
I've seen that before, PearBudget is the site I remember the most. I get that you're trying to get me through the funnel, but if the funnel is the only thing there and there's nothing there to tell me how gong the funnel is or why I should want to go through the funnel, then I'm going to bounce.

I get that you don't actually have to sign up, but pressing a big green button is a commitment of sorts.
I wish more people would take the small amount of time required to find out what Moore's Law really is. Since it only addresses increases in transistor budgets (due to density), it has nothing to do with price.

Another point that more people need to understand is that price = cost + margin. In a competitive market, that margin is determined by perceived value, so if you managed to convince someone that your widget is worth more than the next guy's, you can charge them a higher price... even if you originally bought the widget from the same supplier as the next guy.
I echo a commenter on the article: Code Complete 2. Read it all, use it all.
I'm rather new to programming, but sometimes there's good advice to be had from people that are just starting out - they don't take things for granted. Anyway, here's my list:

- How to think. If you can't hold abstract thoughts in your head you should find something other than programming to do.

- How to learn. Progrramming is a dynamic and often changing discipline. You must know how to learn new stuff.

- How to find information. Programming is such a vast field that no matter what you do you'll often come across something you don't know. 99% of the time someone else has had the exact same problem, and the solution is out there if you know how to find it.

If you know how to think, learn and find information everything else will follow.
The coins just need to be coprime, not prime.
I remember a gap between when I started using Google and when ads appeared on the site. Also, it's somewhat relevant that Brin started working towards what would become Google in 1996.
Understood. I suspect flat file is #1 (although it's a big file and the erlang.org server isn't on the world's fastest pipe). I doubt too many "active users" use distro packages because of how out of date they often are. But to me, just for an order of magnitude estimate, it suggests an active Erlang community of perhaps a few thousand users. Just helps me put a number on it when I had no reference previously. You probably have your own estimates based on your traffic stats... and thanks for your Learn You Some Erlang tutorial: http://learnyousomeerlang.com/ !
And here is a tiny nitpick: I can log in with my email address even though the login form says "Username".
The idea is that since creating an Orb is so quick, it makes sense to create sites for all kinds of different things. We're trying to lower the threshold.

Instead of storing stuff locally, in Google Docs, in email, etc., Orbs becomes a handy place to store almost any kind of textual information.
Small correction: there's a fairly low limit to how many volumes you can attach to an EC2 instance. Available storage is very high, but not "theoretically unlimited".
YC is on the record of supporting whatever the founders want. I'm sure they have their personal preferences but they have decided to align themselves with the founders and that actually sets a trend which is now being picked up by other financial parties.

edit: this is actually very smart strategy wise because it avoids friction in all the cases where YC might want something else than the founders which increases the chances of the founders giving it their full 100%. Nothing more de-motivating than to get an 'angel' on board that starts to pull in another direction than were you wanted to go in the first place. So YC actually benefits from not getting their way. And in those cases where the company would fail it doesn't matter anyway.

I think this on face simple item is one of the bigger recruiting factors for YC over other players, they won't get in your way, they trust you to know best what's best for you, which makes them an 'enabler'.
Priceless Unplanned Moments With Naturel Views
Who uses coins to pay exact change? I use bills, pocket the change (or leave it in the dish), it piles up in jars at home.

Make the coins lighter! So my pocket doesn't wear out from carrying half a pound of worthless metal.
The next big thing can be just as simple as the last one
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881278
Check out localupsolutions.com - they might be able to help as they have a white-label restaurant guide solution.
> It's really about common sense and responsibility

I'm not taking a position on whether the book should or should not be made available, but it's worth keeping in mind that the sorts of people who are most interested in trying the stuff in the book are the least mindful of the consequences of their actions. On balance, the fewer teenagers with access to thermite, the better - for themselves and us.
I agree. Have you seen any of Daniel Pink's talks based on his latest book "Drive"? There are some really interesting insights on money and motivation. In fact, in some of his examples/studies, paying people more actually hindered their performance. Here is a link to a summary of his book on RSA Animate. If you have the time, it is quite intersting: http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/04/08/rsa-animate-drive/
> And in any case, most CEOs don't make a HUGE salary.

You should check out the banking industry.
Really nice.

I love the image tool. Super easy to use and looks great. The slider to resize the image is great. A lot of tools like this default to type in boxes for pixel dimensions. In most cases exact pixel sizing just doesn't matter. With your tool I can just drag the slider until it looks right. Any chance of getting some image library functionality so I can browse the images that I have previously uploaded. Not strictly necessary, I could just upload again, but it could be a nice feature.

One small complaint. The behavior of the Add a Link, Add a Table, and Add an Image buttons seems inconsistant. They all have the little down arrow which to me indicates that a menu will drop down with some options. The Add a Table button performs exactly as I expected, but the Add a Link and Add an Image buttons cause a "dialog box" to popup. Using the dialog box is fine in general, but because of the down arrows I am expecting a menu and it is a little jarring.
Check out ARC, ZFS has a implementation of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Replacement_Cache
We've got a client with a huge ($15,000) array of SSDs, that he's using to serve out about 9 gigabits of traffic per second from his webserver with one RAID enclosure. Duplicating the performance with normal drives would be cheaper for drives, but take several more enclosures.
I somewhat disagree with this - it depends entirely on what you're doing. If you're writing a 3D gaming engine you're absolutely right, but if you're writing simple webapps, which most people are nowadays, you don't really need to know what a linked list is. Your programming language of choice will abstract it away.

These are certainly good things to know, but for most people not really essential or even important.
Observation isn't science. This is the fundamental difference between Engineering and Science.

In Engineering, I want to solve this one challenge; I don't want to generalize to a whole class of examples or the whole Universe.

In Science, I make a hypothesis, usually based on prior observations, I conduct controlled experiments, not just observing the World around me, and from the resulting data, I derive a theory.
That interface looks like ass.
Optimizely is hiring software engineers!
Optimizely (http://www.optimizely.com) is a well-funded, Googler-founded, YCombinator company in San Francisco. We're primarily looking for bright, hard-working, fun people, but Python and/or Javascript experience is a plus. Interested parties can contact me at jobs@optimizely.com.

Here's a link to our recent TechCrunch private beta announcement, and a job description:

"YC-Funded Optimizely Makes It Remarkably Easy To Run A/B Tests On Your Website"
http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/15/optimizely-ab-test/

At Optimizely, our mission is to make it easier for organizations to make data-driven decisions, and we’re looking for driven engineers to help us lead the way. Do you love

- working with large amounts of data?

- building creative ways to communicating that data?

- exploring the boundaries of what’s possible with Javascript?

- algorithms?

- working with really great people?

If you answered yes to any of these and you’re sharp as good cheddar, we’d love to talk with you!

Pete
Blue dominates as a color in the west as it represents 'corporate' and 'trust' to western eyes (if you ever want to got through customs faster at the airport wear a blue shirt). I'd imagine if you did the same ting for Asian companies the predominant color would be red.

http://webdesign.about.com/od/color/a/bl_colorculture.htm
How to find information is a skill that is no longer just for librarians, that's rapidly becoming a 'must have' skill for just about every job.

If you don't know how to effectively search for information that is already available out there then you are probably wasting valuable time re-inventing various wheels.

If there is one thing I would do if I had a company with employees of any kind it would be to teach newcomers in a couple of hours the finer points of using search engines and other online resources.
My claim was maid on the only reliable source of information i have: my own experience. Most "interesting" girls i know are extremely passionate, just not about machines, the once that are, see them a bit differently than i do. Call me what ever you like, in the world I've grown up in, boys play with trucks, girls play with dolls. What ever the reason, i don't know, i expressed an opinion, and CLEARLY stated that im no expert on the mater.