skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No need for specialty fonts for chess since all chess pieces are in Unicode:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_symbols_in_Unicode
I know the costs are a little higher if you have a certain percentage of h1-b employees on your staff. But 20K is a little out of control.
No modding needed with the recently released, cheesily named Sturmey-Archer S3X. It's an internally-geared three speed fixed gear hub: http://www.sturmey-archer.com/products/hubs/cid/3/id/47 .
Disaster can also be a great teacher:
Long ago, I started work at Oracle with 2 cohorts. We were asked to install the product locally as a sandbox to work in and learn. The install went flawlessly for my 2 buddies. My install was a disaster, and it was the best possible thing that could have happened. I learned more over the next 2 days of frantic troubleshooting than most learned over the course of 6 months. My cohorts laughed at the time, but they never caught up.
yay timetric! still fuzzy as to what you guys actually do :) (i suck at maths)
Of the current non-chain solutions, the Gates belt system actually seems like a good idea for a commuter bike. Zero maintenance, long life, no grease, and quiet.
I never knew the Challenger disaster crew survived the explosion. It's a pretty damning indictment of institutional politics that steps couldn't be taken for similar situations to be non-fatal.
Comic Sans is often used quite deliberately to give an air of unprofessionalism/cheapness. I suspect that Papyrus is more often used in a misguided attempt to look arty or historic and would probably get significantly less use with better default fonts.
If you decide at 50 to become a doctor, you have some hard work ahead of you.

Understandably so.

In my experience, universities in my area admit adults into their "continuing education" track. It's sadly nothing more than a collection of humanities and introductory liberal arts courses. For some reason I cannot attend a university to study physics for the pure joy of it (granted, most people including myself wouldn't have the financial backing to return to the ivory tower for the joy of it).

I'm simply a life-long learner. I think it's a shame that universities have simply become expensive job requisites.
Link to the original story:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/sep/22/timetric-fin...
It's not hard to replace a broken chain link. While you probably can't fix a belt, it probably wouldn't be a big deal to carry a spare.
If you want to really muse about missed innovations, look at recumbent bike designs. Every one uses upright bikes today.
Index the world's economy. Specifically all the bits people will pay for insight into. :)
Christine O’Donnell’s Media Strategy Vs. Bad Science
Well, if am not wrong he was an early investor in mint.com. And he has some interesting insights about startup metrics (google AAARR metrics). The rant on the post is his signature style
Nice! I didn't know they'd released it, thanks for the heads up. Time to build a new wheel. :)
Net neutrality is one aspect, but I hadn't been thinking about that specifically. One could also cite, in recent history, regulations governing lightbulbs and toilets.

Seriously, I challenge you to cite any business that one could safely enter, without any thought to the way government forces the companies in that field to do business.
Thanks for the comments; I've passed on the feedback to the right people!
Why not Parrot?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrot_virtual_machine
Isn't your analogy in the last paragraph a good argument in favour of non-circular gears? Gears that allow you to output the same amount of power all the time.
an example or two are in order.
"innovation & investing is not about price. it's about finding great entrepreneurs to build solid companies, and solve customer problems"

That's the reason why I WOULD DO BUSINESS with Dave.

Anyone who as followed Dave even remotely over the past half decade will understand and appreciate his style.

He says it as it is and that rare candour is something special in the venture capital business.
Why?

Disregarding all the abusive and offensive language, his points are unnecessary. He could just as well have written "We are not colluding. Mike got it wrong. This is what we talked about: ..."

He's leading Arrington's claims ad absurdum and concludes that everything is horse shit and hater shit and a steaming pile of crap, yo, bitches.

Why is Dave McClure important again?
Thanks for the comments; I've passed on the feedback to the right people. XP itself is being sunsetted "real soon now", so it doesn't make sense to focus our energies trying to make IE9 on XP be awesome, especially when crippled back lack of D2D. It would make for a servicing nightmare. Of course, this is all my own opinion.
Selling tools during the goldrush always was a winning strategy, it's a long long way from "atomistic studies of glass behaviour" :)

Much good luck to you guys, large datasets have always held a magical lure for me, you never know what you're going to turn up.
Exactly. You can't program by "ok, let's learn the syntax, now let's move onto strings, now objects..." you need a project, and then it's 100x easier to learn what you need to know. You'll never know everything, but that wouldn't have happened if you went the other way anyways.

Even after a year of iOS programming, I still consider myself a beginner, and I probably always will be. There's nothing wrong with that. :)
Actually, they both reference the 1979 Tom Wolfe book:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_Stuff_%28book%29
Meaningful urban farming looks like victory gardens.

Not a fab.
You could start by putting some contact information in your profile - a web page, your location, that sort of thing.
I don't get that sense from posts.

But even if being in finance is better than being in CS, in places where performance is rewarded being in finance with a CS degree is better than being in finance with a finance degree.
Haml and Sass are Split
Unlike Mini-WWW, the problem with Instapaper is the resulting format is the SAME for all pages! It's rather boring world!
I could use one font in my whole design career, though it would be an awefully short one if I did!
Hard work is a total waste of time
Thanks for the very precise feedback. I am passing it on to the right folks ... note that download speed is already available, btw. See: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2010/09/19/show-...
Just one sample:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1613347

There are many more besides it.
Thanks for taking a look Reg.

Would you mind if I ran an idea past you?

The other idea I'm toying with is something similar, but having immutable classes. So basically every time you add a new method, instead of modifying the class you would return a brand new class.

Crazy? :-)
Brain's impulse control center located
Google Wave + GMail + Google Docs + Google Voice = Google Tsunami
I got it, apologies for this. Sounds like my TMDA (http://tmda.net/) installation is slightly wonky. I also got the gmail version, will respond shortly :-)
Would it surprise you to learn that even Arrington's "Friends" don't necessarily want him around all the time?
lambda@supagraham.gram? ^^
Zynga Moves 1 Petabyte Of Data Daily; Adds 1,000 Servers A Week
Forrst Invites Redux
>That's interesting, the prevailing opinion here on HN seems to be that being in 'finance' is better then in CS.

I strongly disagree, as to HN's "conventional opinion". I think most participants and probably most lurkers, would say that finance is probably, on average, a more lucrative field, but a CS degree from a no-name university would probably be better for getting into finance, the field, than an equivalent finance degree. This assumes you're working for someone else.

A finance degree is less useful for a technology/coding business/startup than a CS one. This is the raison d'etre of the forum. I would also contend that for getting FY$, personally financially independent rich, a startup is probably at minimum equivalent to working in finance. As such, neither is a bad choice, but the CS degree has better options.
Recording the album is the easy part, promoting it is a full time job.
I'm in a similar boat. I'm 31, married, with no kids so far. I quit my job to pursue a startup. It's good timing for me.

To be a successful founder, I don't think that it makes a lot of difference how old you are, but it does make a significant different where you are in life. I think this manifests itself most if you're trying to find a co-founder.

Most founders in their early 20s have very little in the way of assets or obligations to speak of. This makes finding a compatible co-founder in the same age group much easier. Everyone starts out in a similar situation.

On the other hand, founders in their 30s have had a lot more time to complicate their situation (for better or worse): kids, marriage, mortgage, and money. Finding a co-founder is more difficult, since accommodating both potential founders can be more difficult. There's more to accommodate.

In my social circles, there tend to be more complicated situations than simple ones.

Does anyone have any experience to share?
Actually, if you click on his profile, you will see he is on the other side of the Atlantic. ;-)
What made it click for me was programming in anger. Programming because I needed to. Programming because I gave a damn about what I was writing and I wanted it done sooner rather than later.

What made it click for me was programming in fear. Programming because I needed to. Programming because I gave a damn about my customer being satisfied and I wanted to get paid sooner rather than later.
Thanks; I'm not sure about the "get more of the IE Team on" bit. Personally, I'd rather the bulk of the IE folks focus on making IE9 better than ask around for feedback. I realized that even through these channels, I'm overwhelmed (my day job isnt to collect feedback for IE - there's folks who do that for a living; I'm just a regular hacker like the rest of you here with an interest in understanding what the people want ;) so I gotta say I'm not sure that's a good (tm) thing, really.
Yep. http://www.lexical.org.uk/science/thesis/.

But then it's less far than you'd think. The starting-point for most of the ideas in the Timetric platform for us cofounders was building tools for scientists (who aren't programming specialists) to manage really obscene amounts of data. The thing is, the best scientists usually weren't the best programmers – they'd spent their time studying atoms, not bits – so there was a real problem; there were a bunch of inaccessible problems because no-one had the expertise they needed in both areas.

It's just a profligate waste of talent, really.

File off "science" for that problem and you can see where we're going with Timetric.
We're just getting started with touch based apps..
This is more a description of "how to type in code that appears to solve today's problem". But that's not programming, that's code monkeying.

To learn how to write real programs, you need to read real programs. Is Emacs bugging you? Open the source and see how it works. Web server crashed? Read the source and fix the bug. Not sure how to configure cron? Take a look at its config parser!

Many "programmers" spend their entire life treating everything as a black box. Take a look inside the box! That's how you really learn to program.
I think Joel (as he often does) has oversimplified this massively. If you are a really good developer then the majority of 'other peoples' code will seem to be crap, likely because it is. It is a minority of coders who really and truly care about how they build software and an even smaller group of those who know how.

Crap software happens because most people don't care about how to write software. It would be like people publishing novels with only a cursory knowledge of the language (and style) they are writing with (not that this doesn't happen cough twilight cough).
See also: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2010/09/end-dumb-tables-web-a...
Correlation != Causation

The article revolves around how much more likely it is for obese children to be infected by the virus, how much more likely it is for children infected to be obese, and how much heavier are the infected children than the rest (even than obese but not infected children).

This is hardly surprising for a virus that specifically targets fat cells!
FYI this article has been rewritten a bit.
Contact people on YC that are already planted in areas you want to be involved in. Add an email and website to your profile. Tweet. Create a "brand" of yourself. Soon, hopefully people will start knowing who you are.

That's what I'm doing right now, anyways. I'll tell you how it is going a month from now.
+1. Try to figure out when your green card application will be filed. The earlier, the better.
I don't get the sense from HN that being a finance major in school, especially as an undergraduate, would be better than CS. As someone who is doing both finance and CS courses as an undergrad currently, the jobs for finance majors all end up being analyst positions. A CS degrees gives you much more, better options if you're good at it, and allow more flexibility if you want to go out on your own. Finance is only glorious if you're one of the handful of people who get a potentially soul-crushing i-banking job as an Excel drone with opportunity to move up or do an Ivy MBA.
> Why are the law enforcers (or the banks, or other appropriate organizations) not goiging after these "re-sellers", atleast to find/track the original thieves?

Um, who says they're not?
Err, I talked about writing such a script.
Well, now that respectable people are joining startups too, perhaps my dad will stop telling me to stop this startup silliness and get a real job... grin

Yeah right, keep dreaming.
Manos de Mono: The Manifesto (.NET Web Framework)
This is HackerNews is it not? Land of VC opportunity?

Hunter S. Thompson was dead-right when he said "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." It seems to me the jet-black reputation held by the music industry provides a business opportunity for an enterprising person on HN.

It seems to me that the fundamental problem is that no one has set up a distribution clearinghouse for artists which is paid for services rendered rather than treating artists as work for hire.

Someone should set up a record company which provides services and maintains a meticulously honest and above-board reputation:

1. The Artist owns his own work.

2. The Artist is presented with various options, none of which are permanent. For example, he can enter into a limited-time exclusive distribution agreement with the company in return for studio time to produce the work and a fixed rate of return on proceeds. No advances are provided. If the artist has produced the work himself, the amount of exclusive time may be decreased or the return may be increased to compensate.

3. The company does not require managers, lawyers, or engineers. However it may make recommendations to the artist as to how to find good ones on his own. If the artist wishes, the company can provide them for him, again for a cut of the rate of return.

4. The company also can also arrange for the artist to go on tour but again does not require it: it's an option available. The artist has an up-front negotiated rate on the proceeds.

5. All contracts are simple, honest, temporary, modular, and cover exactly and only the particular item the Artist is essentially purchasing from the company (record distribution and studio time, touring, etc.).

Obviously the hairiest issue would be dealing with distribution firms. But that particular business is changing very quickly, and indeed distributors may be entirely gone in ten years. The time is ripe, gentlemen.
What do you want to know about accessibility and web apps?
I've been doing web development for 15 years, and I have done so while having a vision disability. In the course of my week, I'll use magnification tools, screen readers, and other techniques to get my job done. Because of this background, I'm very conscious of the problems that people with disabilities face when working on the web. I've also noticed that a lot of developers are unaware of the issues or have outdate or incorrect information or beliefs about accessibility.

I'd love to change that.

I'm planning to write a series of blog posts on accessibility issues that developers should know about. I'll cover disabilities for sure, but I'll also be talking about accessibility in terms of connection speed, mobile devices, and other topics. I'm interested to know what kinds of things you'd like to see more about. I'll do my best to provide helpful solutions and advice, and avoid the snarky "yer doin it wrong" stuff.

I have a daughter with the same vision problems I have, and I want to make the web a better place for her. While I'm at it, I'd like to do that for everyone. I believe that web apps planned with accessibility in mind benefit all users, not just the disabled.
Shed more light on why you think it is 'wrong' ? No, sorry. I don't make policy decisions nor am I privy to why we do some of the things that we do. What I do know is that the people working on IE9 carry good intent and are working their butts off trying to make it the best browser out there. If you have specific problems with pinned sites/etc., lemme know and I'll be happy to point it at the right people.
Who said the actual implementation for the Mini-WWW search would be the same next week? And WHO SAID THE MINIMAL INTRODUCTION PRICE OF $1 IS FOREVER?!!
Just because he does a bad job of making his argument doesn't make it wrong.
I'd actually love to give you a concrete example but, well, commercial confidentiality. We'll be launching paid services very soon.

But if you look at the public macro on timetric.com - we've got something like 1.6m freely-available time series - it'll give you a decent flavour.
I had the exact same thought. PHP is already dog slow... that's one of it's trade offs. An extra layer of indirection would kill it.

Also, you are losing a few important feature of PHP by doing this:

- Type hinted arguments (http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.typehinting.php)

- Static method calls

- Autoloading

And there are a bunch of things that would become nightmarish to manage. For example, object serialization or cloning.
There seems to be a severe case of group think on HN today.

Why are so many people raining on Dave? The points he makes seem to make a lot of sense.

I'm pretty sure that an agenda that will attract the smartest angel investors for a meeting will stretch far beyond "collusion to bring valuations down".

The fact of the matter is that owning 1% of a company that exits for $100mm is far better than owning 10% of a bankrupt startup. These investors know this better than anyone and I'm pretty sure that increasing the size of the pie, attracting more startups, increasing the number of exit channels etc were the chief points of discussion and not "how do we make sure we own 10% instead of 5%".

Having said that, it's pretty much Dave's word against Mike's and I'll pitch my tent in the proven serial investor's camp any day.
I think the idea is that it's relevant to whether or not he's a good investor, notwithstanding his writing style.
No, you cannot install any version of IE alongside another version of IE. It's not an officially supported configuration. Microsoft supplies images for testing purposes, and that is the preferred route to take. If you want side-by-side testing, you could use the PPBs (Platform Preview Builds) instead from http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/
You need smallish goals and little projects that you actually care about. Start with javascript for some UI effect for your blog, for example. Starting with a whole PHP/MySQL site may be too much at once. And let's face it: the first few sites you create are going to barely work. I am a database expert but it took me a really long time before I understood SQL well enough to be comfortable with it, and a really long time after that before my skills could gel enough to really take off quickly. But along the way I had a continuous need to use databases.

After time your smallish projects get increasing ambitious. Javascript can't do something you need, move up to PHP. I "learned" languages by reading books or even taking classes but I have long since forgotten everything that I never actually had a need to use in the real world. I "learned" C but I remember things from javascript that I learned 12 years ago because I've actively used javascript on and off since then.

You need a CS degree to answer some programmer interview questions and as a quality indicator for kids right out of school, but plenty of really solid developers started learning by taking up smallish web dev tasks that became increasingly and increasingly ambitious over time. To get really good it takes years and years of doing this though.
nice strawman.

If you have a real concrete goal, and your web server crashes, you'd try to fix it just like you say.
It is straightforward, but my understanding is that "transferring" an H1B is getting a new H1B via the new employer. The only differences are that (1) the new H1B won't be counted against the yearly cap and (2) you don't have to wait until 1st Oct to start working.
It's not. Jwr accused Dave McClure of incoherence, not collusion.
Robert Bringhurst's book is fantastic, but if you're starting off, I recommend James Fellici's "Manual of Typographic Style."
I've usually found pedalling mostly downwards inefficient, because it pushes me off the seat. If I want to get power out of pedalling, I put particular care into pedalling back and forth - the top foot forwards, the bottom foot backwards. For this to work well, though, you need pedal straps or very toothy pedals.
I'm glad to see that startups (especially in London where it's far less common than California) are becoming more and more of an option for people with already steady jobs looking for something new.
How does this theory sit with Bill Clinton's impeachment?
I don't see reason to believe we'd move away from Windows Update. Also, we can't do "silent updates" like some other browsers manage to for a variety of legal reasons. I've had this discussion internally in the past. It's a nightmare for us (how awesome would it be for me to not service IE6/IE7 folks at all today) but unfortunately, I know we're severely limited by US & international law.
It's different in my case because the traditional finance career bath does not appeal to me. I went to a large state school in a (relatively) small city, got married, and stayed here, which doesn't bode well for a career in finance. I got a job at a small regional bank in commercial lending, right when the credit crisis was hitting its stride. Stayed there for about 6 months, then left to start a company with my wife. My finance education has come in handy running the business, but I feel like I would have also benefited from some CS education as well. A half CS/half finance program may have been a good fit for me (not that something like that exists where I went to school).

I hope that makes some sense. Obviously it's hard to say where I'd be if I had gotten a degree in CS (or if I'd have made it out alive!); hindsight is of course 20/20.
Actually, I don't believe that was what DHH meant. Everyone is going to write a spaghetti mess starting out. The only way to learn from that is to write more and more code(that you'll need to maintain) and teaching yourself what well designed code is and why it matters.
I respectfully disagree.

Mike made some serious insinuation of improper behaviour that was targeted at the super angels i.e Dave, Ron et al

Dave has every right to discredit it. Especially when Arrington wasn't a participant and Dave was.
Can't speculate, sorry.