skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First suggestion: if you want business, give people a way to contact you. Put an email address (at least) in your HN profile. :-)

Corollary: personal website ASAP shamelessly pimping yourself. With contact info all over it.

Other people are doing what you want to do. They need help, and if they know you exist you might get some overflow work from them.

Phil
Running R on Amazon EC2
It's not just that; PEPs aren't versioned. Having a spec which just "magically" changes doesn't help anyone in the community trying to code to the specification.

Personally (and I said this in the thread) I think this is more than just procedure, and we do need to just bite the bullet and do a 1.1 spec in addition to PEP 444.
This is a commonly repeated trope, but I don't think it's true.

Thanks. I know it is a commonly repeated trope, which is why I gave it as an example -- knowing that someone was likely to argue the specific example but hoping it would suffice as an example of the point I was making. Relying heavily on AC strikes me as a short-term view kind of solution. It is cheaper (in the long run) and more effective to rely more heavily on passive solar design.
Yesss.

The way I describe this to people is: "Usability science can only test a hypothesis. It doesn't give you a hypothesis to test."

Not to mention the problem of hill-climbing… you may think your test results are amazing, but you can't tell if you're really at a peak or in a valley with a lot of mist obscuring a potentially even higher peak..
There's a big difference between working on a startup and trying to be a rock star.

Even if you fail at a startup, you have learned a wide array of skills in the process. You have gotten hands-on experience with a variety of technologies. You have learned, through experience, some lessons on making products for a customer. You've learned something about business, and finance, and investing.

If you fail at being a rock star, well, you have some skills at playing the guitar, and can go on to being a mediocre guitar teacher or work in a wedding band. If you fail at a startup, everything you've learned can be applied towards more stable jobs in the tech industry.

Now, I wouldn't advocate dropping out of school necessarily. But taking a year or two off to try your hand at a startup, and then go back if it doesn't take off? That doesn't seem too unreasonable; there are people who decide to take a year or two off before college to make some money and get some working experience.
How do they know that the data they collected in their interviews is reliable?
A response: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1729035
The Big Interview with Eric Schmidt
> I'm willing to do the first couple of clients pro bono<

Getting worthy non profit clients to act as guinea pigs may be a tough row to hoe (if you're not using "pro bono" as a synonym for "unpaid").

A common way to extend a portfolio through unpaid work, is to build something for yourself...e.g. using your company's website as an example of your web development skill.

My advice is never to take commercial work for free.

First, you're running a business.

Second, word of mouth recommendations will include your price. When your proposal includes getting paid, you will have already failed to meet the potential client's expectations.

Third, when you are not getting paid to help someone make money, it is harder to have the dedication required for excellence.
I see one flaw with their plan, eBooks...
I tried 4 times to leave a new comment, but the site keeps crashing. Strange. I tried 3 times with the HN link, then switched browsers and tried on a fresh link. No go.

I'm finding lots of people begging for invites. Very strange business model. Show something cool, then prevent people from signing up. Many of the comments I've browsed are some pretty pissed people.

UPDATE: I went over to the Scribe forums and tried again there. That seems like it might work http://iscrybe.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=16817#16817
Putting a Price Tag on Winning - Graphic
This is just an update, unaccepted, to the specification which makes WSGI play nice with Python 3. Note that PEP 444 http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0444/ is still being worked on.

I made my opinion known in the mailing list thread, but I don't think having the spec updated in place is a good idea. We need a 1.1 and to continue the PEP 444 work, even if the original PEP has ambiguities, people have coded to it.

Additionally, what worries me is that these changes have not been tested in the wild as of yet.

So, don't go running into things or shouting victory from the rooftops yet; this is still in flux.
Discussion under advertisement would have made that advertisement more efficient.
Whose money are they supposed to use? Whose money do they use to torture people or to conduct domestic propaganda campaigns?
List of misconceptions
Is it OK for wimp.com to be stealing video like this?
Outgoing Nokia exec pees on handset makers who choose Android
Shaffer's publisher, St. Martin's Press, released a second printing of the book that it said had incorporated some changes the government had sought "while redacting other text he (Shaffer) was told was classified."

From single words and names to entire paragraphs, blacked out lines appear throughout the book's 299 pages.
I think the real issue is, why does anyone think Dan Lyons is worth listening to? He has a long history of trolling and shilling, we shouldn't indulge that behavior or take him seriously.
Importance of Cash over Profits
Bill Gates Ranking Top of US Rich
> A DDG/stackoverflow/email/linode-like slice big enough for your irssi sessions could be rolled into a service with a focus on privacy/spamblocking and adblocking I think many would pay for.

I'm not sure I fully understand what you mean. Are you suggesting renting out VPS's that provide DDG/SO/email access over an encrypted line, so your ISP wouldn't be able to spy on you?
Robin Hanson's Opinion Warning Signs
I'm not missing anything - like I said Google at present is unable of such strong focus/commitement.

But... If google were headed by Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison - like persona, then you could see what I mean :)
Isn't the real problem that people want a better curated market? Cut down on the spam, apply standards for permissions, make sure apps don't use the 1.4 security model (did that even ship on any phones?).
Evidence for many (maybe most) cases is gathered at the interrogation stage. The larger the group the likelier it is that an investigation involving talking to the people there will uncover everything.

www.homadynamic.com
> You don't "discover" that you're gay any more than you "discover" that you're straight (...)
In perfect society it would be like that. However, the culture I live in revolts around straight relationships, and there's just no place for homosexuality, except of maybe designating some people as "them", in contrast to "us". It sucks, but it is the reality. Children growing in this kind of society come to think that being straight is "default". That's why I do not think that situation is symmetrical -- it takes more effort to acknowledge that you are gay than that you are straight in this kind of culture.
He's right that users will leave if you use them... However, you can use them a LOT before the vast majority will be upset, and then a lot more before they actually do something about it.

Look at Facebook. That site is the least consumer-friendly site I've ever joined. They don't care about privacy and only respond to outrage. And despite all the 'leave facebook' protests, they continue to grow and make money both.

Is it ethical? No. But there's a lot of money to be made and sometimes it's easier to do so if you're unethical. So they are.

I wouldn't treat my customers unethically, but then, I'm not a millionaire, am I?
But the main Google Trends indicator is over search query logs, not web results. (That's another tab for web results, but it doesn't work for this query.)

So queries like "django" count for this one. However, we don't know whether those searchers want the web framework or the musician.
No expectation of privacy on public transit
Seems wikipedia disagrees with what you've heard:

His grandfather had a stroke in 1949. Since he was the
president of Nintendo and had no other immediate
successor, he asked Hiroshi to come immediately to
Nintendo to assume the position of president.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshi_Yamauchi#Start_of_his_c...
That's an ad hominem attack, on the same level as 'oh, he'd say that of course, he's a politician.' When you do that, you lose the opportunity to examine the arguments he's presenting based on merit.
I am mesmerized by the anthology of well-used analogies and metaphors.
Yeah - I meant - I know what NodeJS is - but what is that whole Joyent / no.de thing about? Is it hosted NodeJS? Or something completely different?
Summary: They need more smart and less machine.

You can try an instance out for a day or two and just cancel your account. I ended up canceling my test instance but am thinking of trying it again to see how they did with the node stuff.

Frankly they are just as much of a pain in the butt to get everything working as before they were rebranded as SmartMachines from Accelerators or whatever they where called before Joyent bought textdrive.

I also find the documentation lacking compared to the excellent tutorials that slicehost provides and this is kind of a big deal if you are not familiar with Solaris.

see: http://wiki.joyent.com/all-accelerators:kb:start

vs: http://www.slicehost.com/community

I don't know what they have been doing for the last 5 years but it sure has not been working on their docs or writing their own nifty control panel software because they just install a skinned version of webmin for you. Yay, webmin...

They do claim to be faster than the other virtualization platforms like xen and it might be true because Solaris Zones are pretty sexy but again there is a learning curve and you have to use Solaris. EC2 and the other VM based hosting guys give you much more flexibility and if you just want to host rails then it's going to be about 100 times more of a pain[1] than just using Heroku. If I'm going to overpay I will take time saving vs a little performance any day.

[1] http://wiki.joyent.com/shared:installing-rails
If all else fails, try to be the sole heir of your grandfather's empire ;)
I'm not sure that was the conclusion at all.

They modeled the dust particles in the solar system at various stages of the solar system's development. They saw that today, Neptune's gravitational pull creates a noticeable footprint in the Kuiper belt (a massive body of dust and rocks forming a ring outside the orbit of Neptune). When looking at other star systems they could potentially see similar footprints, which would imply the presence of Neptune-sized planets.

They also saw that when modelling the young solar system, the result looked very similar to the Fomalhaut system. This system is known to be young and also known to have at least one large planet. So from that the technique could also be used to identify young star systems that may contain planets.
1) You should have a list of short 1-2 week projects that founders can work on together. Something founders can work on that is pretty generic and can put a price tag on.

2) You can charge for forming groups around these 1-2week project. Like 5 pounds or something.

So, teams can be formed around ideas and there wouldn't be so much focus on the other person. You can collect their personality types and track which group went on to form teams, this data will be useful for PR.

You can even charge for people to watch a project progress. This might be useful for early start-ups who want to find good people[essentially the same thing as finding a co-founder]. This should open the market up beyond the 1,000-10,000 that vaksel talked about.

Also, matchfounders.com might be infringing on match.com name, so that might need to be looked into.
Told to Eat Its Vegetables, America Orders Fries
Ben -

I wasn't familiar with Larry Wall; thank you for introduing me to him.

And yes - I agree that another way to think about skills is that they are interests. I often define interests as "what do I think about when I can think about anything I want." It tends to be a pretty good clue as to what we do best.

Thanks again,
Whitney
Some of these examples are silly. Adding sound effects (Foley) is completely standard practice. The fact that Winged Migration involves training birds to fly next to cameras is fully documented in the "making of" feature on the Winged Migration DVD and was never hidden.

On the other hand giving multiple animals a single name and pretending there's an unbroken drama is disturbing because it genuinely distorts stories and might teach the wrong lesson, for example that a species is doing fine, when in fact it's facing major obstacles.
to be fair it probably cost less than having the guy assassinated and staging a "suicide"
the domain is clever!
Except that Mark Zuckerberg himself didn't know he would become "Mark Zuckerberg."
Tl;dr, need summary of "Celebrities and Shoes on the Female Brain"
Make A Better Elevator Pitch
Google's vision of the future: bikes meets monorail
That is spot on. Disruptive skills as applied to an individual game-change our career. Appreciate your weighing in.
Is there an article about Foursquare choosing to use Lift over other alternatives? The only ones I can find on the switch, at the moment are: http://www.scala-lang.org/node/5130 and http://java.dzone.com/articles/interview-lift-creator

Edit: Nevermind, found the answer on Quora - http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Foursquare-choose-Lift?q=foursq...
HN only covers a smallish section of the tech industry. What so many techies lack is knowledge of other industries or connections to other industries. So if you go work for a few years in finance, retail, oil exploration or whatever, you're going to be quite an interesting co-founder for technology focused startup founders.
LUI = "Linguistic" UI, including CLI

You're right it can be easier once you are familiar with it, but there's nothing to suggest how/if "up" works if you are not.
That's really cool! Out here in Europe we just hear how the Chinese government is demolishing traditional quarters for making roads and big buildings, so that's definitely great news.
So it's not just me ... there is now scientific evidence that women are just nuts.
Right on.

I dropped out of high-school to work at a web company programming in perl. I was ensconced with the idea of doing something I usually tinkered with at three in the morning while trying not to wake up my mother AND making a butt-load of cash doing it (at least for a teenager).

The crash came about a year later and I had to go back to finish school so I could get into college. That was a little embarrassing, but I got through it...

... and did it again. Fast-tracked a year of audio engineering and thought I could start up a label and produce records. Started my own business this time.

sigh

I wouldn't get back into programming for a few years, but I say it was worth it.

Now I love programming, but who knows? In a few years I might want to be building hot-rods or running an expat cafe in some foreign country.

You only get to live once.

UPDATE: edited for spelling/grammar/clarity
HTML5 Cross browser Polyfills
I agree that things seem more shiny than innovative. Maybe "easy" problems are a natural way of increasing our general software competency across the general population. Before we can get to the big-problem innovation in things like AI and nano tech we have some steps to take. That probably explains why it a seems so natural.
David Wright Miliband, Mp Leadership Candidate for The Labour Party
I always wish they would make clear "rules of engagement" in shows like Man vs Wild. In other words the crew is not allowed to provide any assistance or interference until the person trying to survive says its an emergency, and they would show that moment on film. That would add drama and achieve a clearer view of what the experience is really like.
No, the more apropos argument would be "Oh, he'd say that of course, he's 'Tricky' Dick Nixon".

The parent poster is pointing out that Dan Lyons, not all pundits, has a very bad track record, one I'll note that goes back more than half a decade, and therefore bias in looking at what he says is warranted.

Which is an argument I find hard to disagree with. If he wasn't the author of Fake Steve Jobs I personally wouldn't be interested in a word he has to say; there are other people out there with more credibility covering what he does so he can be safely ignored.
Great, I couldn't really believe that someone missed the hype.

And yes, both provide early beta hosted Node.js.

Heroku use their current infrastructure and offer node.js dynos on their new Beech stack. It's easy and fun to use.

Joyent offers a full VPS based on SunOS. It can host node.js and other supporting packages, databases, all freely installable. You can even ssh into a SmartEngine. Ryan Dahl, the creator of node.js, has joined Joyent.
They can communicate with their families and talk to the outside world. They know efforts are underway to rescue them. I think those make a huge difference in keeping them hopeful, compared to someone trapped that has no idea if anyone is even looking for them.

I read that they haven't told them how long it will be until the rescue shaft will be ready. I'm not sure whether it's better to think that you will be rescued "any day now" or that you are going to have to tough it out for three months with 33 sweaty men.
If you need a job, then freelance web development isn't the way to go. Freelancing isn't a job, it's a business. If you were able to get a job doing web development, then that would be the best way to get started. That way you can learn from the others you are working with, get more experience as a professional web developer and see how web development works as a business.

Also, I'm not sure I would want to be doing freelance web development while in high school. I assume you are living with your parents and everything is paid for. This would be a good time to to continue improving on your skills, setup a home for your future business, establish your networks and possibly put some work in the open source world. Soon enough you will have real bills and much less time to do things like this, so take advantage of the opportunity while it's there.

I'm also not sure I would want to be doing freelance web development while in college. Again, this is a business. Essentially you are creating your own startup. Freelance work can be stressful and difficult to manage for a full timer with experience, let alone a part-timer just getting started. You need to save your sanity and focus for college if that's your plan. Again, I would suggest if at all possible to get an internship or part-time job doing web development while in college.

Otherwise, I can't give much more advice because you left out a lot of big details. For example, web development is a wide open term. There are a lot of niche areas of development you can get into. Most broadly, you are looking at being a designer or a programmer. What skills do you already have?

No matter what route you choose, your most important skills aren't going to be your technical skills, but rather your people skills. You need to be able to give your clients the warm and fuzzies. You need to be a good communicator. Perhaps most important is that you need to be a good salesman. If you are just average with your tech skills but genius on the people side (including selling) then you will be fine. Being good with sales and savvy with business in general might be the difference between one average developer getting away with charging double or more the rates of an excellent developer who isn't good in this are.

So, personally, I would concentrate on school and look for a job doing web development rather than freelancing. But that's not how I started. I went against all my advice here and ended up fine. If you did the same you will probably be fine also. Good luck either way.
i think it's an interesting idea with potential... the thing that strikes me is that inspiration is an emotional subject, yet the site seems to lack much emotion... the design looks very utilitarian, and the posts look stock and not user generated. the site just has a clinical feel to it... i expected something more like http://www.postsecret.com/
If there was any legal basis for this, you'd think one of the CIA, NSA, DIA, DoD, or SOC could have found a way to ban or properly confiscate the books. Or, if people at the Pentagon who were embarrassed had pooled their own money and bought the books like this, I would have been OK with that. But using public funds to ineffectively remove the books from circulation seems like an abuse of power.
Is it possible to build a compiler in a high level language, such as Python, Ruby, Clojure, etc...?

Note: This may be an obvious question, but compilers are so far out of my area of experience that I don't even know what questions to ask.
I have some experience in the field of co-founder finding. I recognize a couple of features we had speced out in the early days of FairSoftware, that we gave up on fairly quickly.

My advice if I was to do this today: think of the Angel List model: a highly curated e-mail of top-notch founders going to top-notch potential co-founders.
This is fucked up.
Thank you js4all!
If the phenomenon you are describing is real, why can't you find a real example of it?
This reminds me of the saying "the best camera you have is the one you have with you".

The idea of a dedicated camera from Apple would be interesting, though. The user interfaces on existing cameras always feels crude, and there isn't any hope of improvements via firmware upgrades. It fells like a marked ripe for Appl-ification.
A lot of people here seem to be calling foul. But whenever I read a list of startups that YCombinator has funded the formula in every case is:

Clone of (X) Targeted For Audience (Y)

The article is correct about a lot of things. Angel investors (including YC) don't really seem interested in investing in really game changing technology, they're interested in following a trend by buying lotto tickets for a few thousand dollars with the hopes that several will hit medium to large sized jackpots in the shortest possible time frame.
agreed, that's why I made sure to point out that it was a joke:)
How well does lift perform. I think one stat mentioned that it is 6 times faster than rails.

Did anyone do a req/second analysis between scala and rails?
I hit some sort of secure portal. Stripping off the query string "fixes" this:

http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_16155958
Apparently, there was a copy of the book on eBay:

"At least one seller on the online auction site eBay claiming to have a first-edition printing is selling it for an asking price of nearly $2,000. The listed retail price for the second printing is $25.99."

I searched on eBay a few minutes ago, there were multiple copies for sale, possibly 2nd editions pre-orders by opportunists, none at the mentioned $2000 price.
Exactly, nothing in the government happens sans tax-payer money.

"The government uses tax-payer money to clean up after President's dog!"

The titles practically write themselves!
> Windows rules here and Microsoft makes a special version of windows for the japanese market. Maybe it's gotten better with windows vista or 7, I really don't know.

I don't know about XP, but with 7 (Ultimate, at least) there definitely isn't a "special version of Windows for the Japanese market". Japanese Windows is the same old Windows with a Japanese localization pack installed and enabled. You can go into the settings and change it. This is why when you install Windows 7 Ultimate, you get a ton of optional updates that are a bunch of language packs (there are ~25-30).
It's pretty fun, however, you can use firebug or a similar tool to just change the html to link directly to the answer ;-)