skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you put 100% into your startup you'll get 100% out. If you're constantly chasing the dollars/pounds/euros/crores then your startup is under constant pressure to become a side project.

What things like YC do is give you the opportunity to make the idea your full time job with full attention. The money isn't necessarily great but the network is. The alternative is that you raise the money elsewhere and do without the network. If the benefits of that network outweigh the potential later costs of Ycombinator, I'd say do YCombinator. If you need the money and YC is where it's at, do YC. If not, find out how much burn you'd need for a year and go contracting to save up the cash. You can normally get enough money contracting in a year for a further two of frugal living or one for several frugal folk. If you can't get traction there, then you have a problem that YC might not be able to solve.
Programmer. Smart and driven. Went to MIT or Stanford, or else skipped college altogether.

Am I the only one who sometimes feels like you might as well have skipped college if you didn't go to Stanford, MIT, or some other top school? Anything else seems to be considered Blub U., and Google and the other cool companies that you would like to work for don't hire from Blub U.

Maybe this is why so many hackers who didn't get into MIT or some other top school turn to entrepreneurship; degree or no degree, the job opportunities aren't so hot otherwise.
Google Docs adds native support for the Web Fonts API
Every unix based OS deals with package resolution in a stupid way. Didn't the old lisp machines before Linux, FreeBSD, etc solve this with self contained state in a single object? Everything old and solved is the new and hard problem.
Yeah, as that makes clear, Resharper is still staggeringly better.
When he said something like "Being low-class is not budgeting." You know he's just an ignoramus. He's never been poor and has absolutely no concept of what that means. He also doesn't know what it takes to claw and scratch your way out of poverty and I'd bet dollars to donuts that he wouldn't have what it takes to do it.
This is great! I wish this supported (or vice versa) Vimeo Plus videos.
I was in Japan, brought my wife and two kids with me, am 35 and am a single founder. Ha! Didn't need a visa though, but there are ways of making work if you do.
France Starts Reporting "Millions" of File-Sharers
Why Mood Boards Matter
Here's my short "Internet investigation" story:

late at night I found a wallet on the pavement and decided to deliver it myself the following day since the address on the driver's license was very close to my place.

Next day I discover the guy moved. But with some of his info, I found the Google cache of an old Craigslist ad he had posted, that gave me his phone number. He was pretty happy.
Design Critique #1 – Abduzeedo
I think I would stick with yours if you were planning on continuing development for it. If you're not, I'll probably switch.
Courtney Love does the math (2000)
Nestle lost a $15m suit because it forgot a consent form for a model. A girl from Africa settled a case for an undisclosed amount from a photo taken in Africa, in the LA courts because her image was used for advertising without her consent, this happened over a decade later IIRC when she'd moved to the US and was in the process of becoming a model.

You, in general, don't have to have consent to take a photograph of a persons property, because property cannot be defamed in any way. However, making money off of a photograph of someone else without their consent opens you up to a whole host of civil suits that by tort law has almost always been a loser for the photographer.

Not to mention the automated nature of Street View has let a way too many images of semi-naked/naked photos of people onto the internet without their consent, including one of a child, which should never have gotten online to begin with, but legally speaking should never have been photographed to begin with, but we're talking civil violation of the law here and not criminal so I won't go onto this.
You can put 105% into a startup and get 0% out.

You can put 20% into a startup and get 10000% out.

Real life is not like an inspirational half time locker room speech. A lot of these companies you see putting 100% in, I see setting themselves up for failure by betting their lives on a plan that only works if they grab the rope, jump over the scorpion, and hop on exactly the right sequence of crocodile mouths. They don't have to do that. DHH just had Zonda commission a supercar for him. Did he put 100% in during 37signals first year?[1]

[1] Hint: no.
I believe FFox 3.6 supports async attribute as well
Any advice on filling a contracting pipeline with clients while trying to make the most of your early core work too?
There's nothing wrong with that. It's just that you should take his advice with a grain of salt. Would you read an article by Intel about why you should upgrade to a faster processor without being skeptical?
HTC director confirms Windows Phone 7 phones launching next month
Add a link to Google Reader
Thanks man, I know what this is like
The point he is really making is work hard, read your bible, and shut up. Everyone can make it, just do those three things. And if you end up broke and having wasted your life, like so many others, at least you have heaven to look forward to.
One thing I've noticed is that a strong type system does force me to think harder about interfaces.

Sure, you can think just as hard about interfaces without static typing. But speaking personally as someone who does mostly Ruby but is building increasingly complex infrastructure in Ruby and trying to break things up sanely -- it helps me to think clearly when I prototype the interfaces and the types in a statically typed language like Scala.

Surely it's meant to be the other way around? But an interesting realisation for me.

On the other hand, there's that feeling of code which does exactly what it needs to do to pass the tests, nothing more, nothing less. Which while very economical and very suited to rapid development, often doesn't stand up in its own right as a respectable design without regular and very disciplined "and now I go back and refactor" steps. Often those steps correspond (to my way of thinking) with going back and thinking deeper about the types and the interfaces.

So, I think types are more than just a limited kind of testing which happens to run statically - they also give you a conceptual framework and structure, in the mathematical as well as the regular sense of the word. An ontology, if that's not too grand a word for it. And as such they can help shape your design and spur you into phrasing your design clearly. Despite occasionally getting in the way of it.
I don't think the answer is to have a complicated fee structure, just charge more.
How much equity to offer to my investors, partners and advisors. It's a difficult game of judging expectations and understanding motivations.
There is a caveat to this. I find it makes checking mail on the move a PITA, namely - having to check more than the inbox for potentially important mail.

I got around this by using the filters in the same way you describe, but have gmail keep them in the inbox. That way, once I've read them I can delete them from my phone (which is really just archive) and they remain in the appropriate label/folder when I want to find them again.
Interest: Android now on 100 different devices.
I just meant that if we keep people who have demonstrated they are violent in jail longer, that should keep them off of the streets. My assumption was that in jail they'd commit less crimes -- at least on people who weren't in jail.

If every person who commited a violent crime went to jail for life, would that reduce violent crime? I feel like it would, although I have no evidence of it.
> "[I] realized I didn't hate strong typing, I just hated sucky implementations of it[.]"

Same here (but Lua, not Python). I didn't get the point of static typing until I learned OCaml - the static typing in C, C++, Java, etc. is a joke. (Especially C!) Type inference also singlehandedly removes one of the biggest problems with common static typing - structuring code so that types reflect assumptions (and changing them with the code) is no longer incredibly verbose.

I think the most pragmatic approach is probably dynamic typing with support for static annotations and as much inference as is feasible, though. (As with Common Lisp or Erlang's dialyzer.) Static and dynamic typing is more of a continuum than an absolute fork.

Also, minor point - you mean "static" typing, not "strong" typing. While this is a bit of an oversimplification, static vs. dynamic means compile-time-checked vs. runtime-checked, while strong vs weak means "has enforced typechecks" vs "passing around void pointers and casting freely".
And apparently by not acknowledging any single person who helped you along the way. Way to spit on all of those people with such shameless self-aggrandizing pomposity.
Slightly offtopic, but sometimes I wonder about the number of man-years wasted because Microsoft decided to use "Program Files" instead of "Programs". "Yes, you can finally put spaces in your file names. Well done. That doesn't make it a good idea."
From the articles, it looks like the extension isn't listed in the Mozilla or Chrome galleries. Is there a reason for this? How do you think it affects the distribution and exposure of the product?
The tests themselves can be broken too.

Test-driven development also requires a sustained effort to not miss all the possibilities of something going wrong. Developers aren't wired like that, that's why many companies have QA engineers (i.e. people specialized in breaking things).

And not everyone has the resources to do test-driven development. Sure it helps in the long run, just like eating healthy and going to the gym, but when your software was supposed to get released yesterday and you ain't done ... tell me you're thinking about branch / path coverage.
It's just talk. Ignore them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Buchheit "went to college at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio."
Not that I disagree with you. I've been poor and would never had thought along the lines of this piece in that present tense. But looking back now, I certainly do in the past-tense.
"The ad-men in those days enjoyed simple pleasures. They puffed away at their desks. They drank throughout the day. They had affairs with their colleagues. They socialised not in order to bond, but in order to get drunk."

Uhm... That sounds pretty terrible to me. I don't want to work with those people.
OneWeekApp looks pretty cool!
I spent a couple of hours a day afterward to do testing, upgrade the templates, and improve copy.
So using "my" is lazy, sucks, and bad style but "your" is natural, friendly, and easy to maintain. I don't get it.
This is similar to how my parents grew up. My mother shared a bed with all her sisters at one point, but as they got older I think they were forced to be 2 to one bed and 3 to another until the eldest married.

My dad didn't graduate highschool, he dropped out at 15 to start work and move out of his home (because they had more problems than a lack of money), literally at the first chance he got. He worked around to become a mechanic and eventually opened his own shop. He got into fuel injector programming, which got him a job at Ford, which when me and my brother were little meant we had 3 meals a day (literally sometimes 4), got almost everything we wanted but already had everything we needed. We had family vacations to places even my friends didn't get to go to.

I think what he taught me most was to not give up and just keep trying. He said he had over a dozen jobs in a half-dozen years while paying his way to get qualified as a mechanic. He's had 3 companies, all successful in their time before he moved on to bigger and better to get solidly middle-class from not even a working class upbringing.
This article is from 2006, when was his blog better?
Funny thing is, if Microsoft had used a directory without a space I wonder how many apps would exists where they didn't handle path names with spaces correctly.

What would the computing world look like if every program were as temperamental about spaces in filenames as, say, MATLAB (or any CAD software).

"No mom, you can't use spaces in the filename. Why? Because developers are annoyed by how normal people think."
It's not reasonable to expect OS update schedules to coincide with language update schedules. Red Hat's priorities are extremely unlikely to be the same as yours. The apps I build that depend on ruby or python get deployed with a custom build of same into a separate prefix. So either dropping the python dependency or bundling python make sense for mongrel2. Maybe dropping it was easier in this case.
Right on. Seriously, i had some respect for the guy until I read the article. 'invented The Facebook'?
I really[1] like your footnotes.

[1] Really really
SixApart Bought by Video Ad Firm
Craft vs science: thoughts on computer science education
Well, you haven't been looking hard enough. My father was the president of his division in a multinational company. Had roughly 250 employees reporting to him. They axed him and about 40% of the guys at his level world wide, but nobody below him. This lead to "head-less" divisions for the last 2 years (they just didn't replace the presidents) coasting along. Not sure what their game plan is long term.

A year after he was axed, sales were down significantly, and 15 people more people were laid off. A year after that, another 20 people were laid off.

Lockheed Martin is currently going through the same thing, 600 upper management positions in the last month.

Not to complain "managment are people too", since clearly you don't want to think about it, but he had been with the company 28 years with 3 ownership changes during that time, started as a salesman and made it to president. There was no performance problem, it was a financial calc. His boss tried to save him (2nd level down from CEO) but the CFO overruled.

He was also 60 at the time which probably contributed. Considering he was planning to retire at 62 it didnt make much sense, because he just walked out with all of his plans and didn't train a replacement. Tell me it wouldn't make more sense to just have a transition period for 2 years?
So A Blogger Walks Into A Bar…
It seems like space would be an issue, but I do think a 15-20 minute nap around 2-3pm would increase productivity. Even some light exercise like stretching would be nice.
A BigBallOfStuff type should stick out like a sore thumb in a code review, though.

Static typing is a DSL for specifying assumptions in a way the compiler can check. If you misuse it, it can backfire, but that's true of pretty much everything.
The eBay Box -- every box tells a story
It depends on what you mean by running unchanged. Numpy and scipy also support 2.4 to 2.7 (and soon to 3.1) from the same codebase. But everytime a new version of python is out, we need to make some changes, albeit relatively minors. So it is not perfect either.
Ask HN: How important is it for a project to be a legal entity, early on?
I've been working on a potential startup idea in my spare time, and I think I'll eventually want to run with it.

The thing is, I don't know yet how "big" it's going to be. It may end up only being a hobby site I keep up for a few months, I may monetize it and keep it as a secondary income stream, or it may go viral and I might want to look for an exit.

Do I need to set up a legal company before I launch the site and/or start taking people's money? Or is it ok to launch, use Paypal while my volume is low, and only worry about setting up a company and a real payment service when and if the concept proves sound?
Quick rails fix for using mobile_fu and restful_authentication
> Unit tests are "correct" by definition, because they represent the specification for the code that they test.

No, those are acceptance tests. (It's really too bad they can't be the code. Talk about DRY!)

Besides, how does one write tests for bugs they don't know about? (Or can they only be written after the fact?) Wouldn't it be helpful to have some sort of declarative specification so that the compiler itself can generate exhaustive tests?
How to find Quick And Easy Alternative Software
They're basically very smelly houseplants until they get to crawling age.

Maybe some kids are like that. Others can be quite challenging from the get go (such as a kid with a serious medical condition or other handicap, very high IQ, or all of the above).

YMMV. Mine certainly did.
Oh man - a couple of days ago there was this one (Want to be a freelancer? Just punch yourself in the face):

http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2010/09/07/want-to-be-a-free...

Now I don't know what to believe!!
... and I want "Doing Y Combinator in Your 70's." Is that wrong kids?
Hacking CustDev: The Open Source Playbook
Well I'm going on, my girlfriend is a consultant for the WIC program and she has both the numbers and the diet plan in front of her at this very moment, not speculation. And the requirements are federally mandated.

http://www.fns.usda.gov/wic/benefitsandservices/foodpkgallow...

The only vouchers are for "Juice (without extra sugar), Milk, Cereal, Cheese, Eggs, Fruits and Vegetables, Whole Wheat Bread, Fish, Canned Vegetables, and Peanut Butter".
We just wanted to control the growth before we got all the bugs ironed out. We didn't know how well our servers would scale, and we don't have a support staff. Not having the plugins listed certainly does impact the distribution and the exposure of the product in terms of volume - when we come out of closed beta, we'll have them there.

One of the big advantages, though, is that we also get to have more self selecting and passionate users this way and they tell others who would care.
This doesn't really seem to apply to theft.

Otherwise, you wouldn't mind if I stole your car.
I read that Microsoft put a space in there on purpose so that programs would be forced to deal with it. Folders on Windows can have different names depending on the install language. Even if it was "Programs" in English, it might be a name with space in another language.
Usually they don't and/or if they do you have no guarantee of qualifying for it. At one point in my life I made about $12k a year working two full-time jobs, believe it or not, even though a meal at a "sit-down restaurant" was a once a year extravagance, I didn't qualify for many financial aid programs when I went to school. And student loan programs said I didn't have the guaranteed financial means to pay the loans back.

I've personally been on the begging end of paying for tests and the calculus is this, "how many meals do I have to skip to pay for this?"
He doesn't love the woman, you can sense it in the writing. Probably doesn't even like her that much. I picture a scenario where he drifts toward his man-cave aka start-up, when domesticity comes calling. Michael Lewis wrote a book about his domestic situation, but one never doubts he puts wife and kids first. That said, he and the wife were a little more conventinal given their approach.
I was 38 when I started YC. I think that there are advantages to starting late, well enumerated in the linked blog post. I came to YC from Apple, which is about as stressful a "square job" as you're likely to find, and haven't really encountered anything in startup life that's worse than staring down a Jobs imposed deadline that you Just. Can't. Hit.
what plugin are you using to handle ejunkie requests inside of wordpress? does ejunkie manage sales through paypal and google checkout? do they provide good tracking?

I am curious how viable ejunkie + wordpress are as a basic and simple ecommerce platform
Mozilla launches Webcraft, a free online developer training school
I've had a fair amount of hits on my blog posts in the past, but something about putting ads on it always held me back. (Not its not the pride thing).

Alot of people in this space, just kept saying that putting ads on a blog is 'selling out', so that kind of held me back.
Great list of additions to the post.

I just wanted to add that the one mistake managers are most likely to make is not laying off your direct reports yourself. There is nothing more cowardly than handing off the task of severing a relationship with someone you have worked with for years to a random HR guy. I have been part of such a layoff and I lost all respect for the managers involved.
When you work 80-100 hours a week just to keep a roof over your head, and eat at least 2 square meals a day, when exactly should this poor person mow 15 lawns (provided they had a mower and transport to get around) or collect 2000 cans (and again haul all that around)?
usual disclaimer of speak to a lawyer, and also, this depends on your jurisdiction: generally the most important things are:

- make sure anything you create is clearly yours (i.e. not owned by your employer if you have one, not worked on during work time or on work equipment etc)

- if you have anyone else creating intellectual property, make sure you have legal documentation of ownership of it.

in many cases, if you have these areas taken care of, you can create a corporation later if/when appropriate. (i'm assuming by take people's money you mean customers rather than investors)

hope this helps,
Pie chart: Apple's outrageous share of mobile profits
It's worth noting that Python 3.0 supports function annotations, a feature that can be used to implement type checking in Python. What's more PEP 3107 explicitly states that one of the expected use cases is "providing typing information" and "type checking".

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3107/
There's only so many hours in a week one can work to earn this money. Once it's spent, it's gone. You can't just add a few more hours onto the day to make up the difference.
I've seen people worry that if incoming links are split between foo.com and www.foo.com, it will affect Google's ranking of your site.

I don't think this is true and, anyway, the right solution would be to redirect one to the other.
I work in your neighborhood. Walk a few blocks off the NYU campus and you'll find plenty of people who are not exactly overeating due to their financial situation.
I agree with this, but for different reasons. The difference between "Edit my profile" and "Edit your profile" is really a difference in how the relationship between user, interface and back-end system is conceived. When the interface says "Edit my profile", it's represented as speaking for the user to the system, so you have [user+interface] <---> [system]. Which is a technically accurate representation of client-server architecture, and also generally the way the world looks from the perspective of any system - the UI is decoupled, and speaks to the system on my behalf, in my voice. This is the system-centered perspective.

To the average user, the world looks quite different: [user] <---> [interface+system]. Here, the interface isn't part of "me", it's outside, part of the system, so it should speak as the system, not as "me". This is the user-centered perspective, because it reflects how users see the world.

I think this also speaks to why programmers generally tend to be bad at user experience - it's almost an ontological problem. What is software, really? Is it just system, with interface added in later, almost as an afterthought? Or is it interface+system?
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