skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple in the robotics market sure. But there's no way in hell they're buying (what is perceived as) a vacuum cleaner company.
It's the easiest way for people to recognize me. I also realize any actions I take online truly aren't private, so why try to anonymize my actions at all?
How to Go From Hacker to Founder
Thanks. I think one of my biggest fears I have is the impression that once you leave corporate you can't go back (or it is much harder to go back). Is this even remotely true?
Ruby is awesome.

Please don't compare it with java, that makes me so sad.

Java is so bad, deal with it. The good thing about java is the JVM to use with another language like scala, clojure and so on.

Being a programmer is actually funny, you can stay all your life using 10 frameworks to do something for web in java with a lot of lines of code and bugs and think you are so good(like I did), but you're actually so bad.

I'm still trying to learn lisp and start doing some clojure too, can't wait!
The problem arises when you are focused on something very specific, for example designing a particularly complicated series of function calls, you effectively have to keep a stack in your mind, think about locals, instance variables, whatever, abstract stuff that the brain isn't so well designed at retaining, which becomes very vulnerable to disruption.

Let me ask this: after you've written such code, how is it for other people to read it? What is it like for people to debug it?

I think a lot of the problem comes down to us using the brain for stuff it's not great at.

I think good programming design tries to maximize the stuff your brain is good at and minimize the use of stuff your brain isn't good at.
I'm not sure how you can see past your own nose. Oh, wait, you can't.
phpfog.com !
Ideas For Writing an Othello Essay
Writing essays on any of William Shakespeare’s creations can be a challenging task. The same is applicable for writing an Othello Essay. If proper understanding is had of the play and by applying this understanding to write it, you will be able to write an exceptional essay.
Who has the most robots in our soldiers' hands in Iraq and Afghanistan? Who else has developed a robotic vacuum that sells in the millions, or a robotic mop that sells in the hundreds of thousands, or, frankly, any home robot that is not a toy and has sold more than 1 million copies? All of that takes serious engineering talent.
I think Scheme is a fine language, especially when paired with SICP. But I see it as being something that's more of the leap from intermediate to master than total-beginner to literate. I could certainly be wrong about this, however!
Same here, but Mercurial instead of Subversion.
Unrelated, but I often wonder why people insist on a program that prints a string to the screen as the universal best first program. It's very practical, but it's also so tangential to what programming is.

Just delay compilation until the third week and you'll be able to start the dialogue at objects, "is a", "has a", actions, properties. This is the language we use to deal with the world already and though it's got funny syntax attached, it's not a foreign concept to anyone. Talk about the runtime system and it's expectations later.

(Edit: I think this is also why a lot of people hate the IO monad in Haskell so much. Side effects are actually an advanced topic in pure FP so much of the literature on IO is based around flaky metaphors and "don't worry about how this works" just to get people printing things ASAP. If you just use the REPL and don't worry about implementing it then you can build up to understanding the interaction between IO and the RTS in a sensible way.)
If you're going to be sarcastic, be so heavy-handed about it that you could sell it as a Methodology later. :) Otherwise, some people will take it at face value.
Most people don't know what they really want, so they fixate on a huge payday.

Only a few people truly want the huge pay day.

You can tell whether they truly wanted it after they get it -- I've met a whole lot of long-in-the-face founders after their babies were sold.
Really good and insightful post. Looking forward to the design post though you mentioned.
There are 3 types of interviewers

HR rant
Those who can *recommend* to hire
Those who can *actually* hire
For Drupal, I use Aegir (http://groups.drupal.org/aegir/overview), Git, and Make files (http://drupal.org/project/drush_make).

Aegir let's me spin up as many copies of my project as I want for both testing + production.

Git (+ github) stores all my custom development.

My Make files pull together all of my custom code + drupal contributed code + any 3rd party libraries I'm using.
Visible examples of this in practice are actually legion.

One such is in nature photography, a passion of mine. Back when I was a total newbie, another photographer shared an image during a class on photography. His photograph had, in addition to an excellent composition, a stunning sky, and perfect light.

One person's response to the image was something like, "Wow, you were very lucky to get a sky like that for that shot!"

The photographer explained that it hadn't been luck. He had found the spot already, and knew what he wanted to get, knew what time of day would give him the highest likelihood of getting the right light to match his vision, and kept going back to that spot at the right time until everything came together.

Luck is what happens when experience meets opportunity.

He put himself in the right spot, and had the vision and skills to take advantage of an opportunity that he would not have gotten without being in the right place at the right time.

This concept isn't unique to photography obviously -- it's just more visible. :)
If you read the post, the point is made that a defense contractor is a more likely takeover candidate in the near-term. But five years from now, why wouldn't a forward looking guy like Steve Jobs, or even Bill Gates, turn their attention to home robotics?
This is an appropriate working style for dealing with legacy code. The key is to be able to switch gears when you're writing new code that doesn't integrate so heavily and you aren't so constrained (more typical in a startup). Different environments require different working styles.
Upvoted, I've been checking this out recently. As a codebase customer they sent me a free account to deployHQ and it seems pretty nice. It has an API (with a rubygem) so you can integrate it into your scripts to achieve whatever level of fancyness you need.

I'm also looking into the possibilities around having a 'deploy' or 'production' branch in git, and a post-commit hook that automatically deploys (with another script obviously) any commits to that branch. This is how heroku works and it's much cleaner than capistrano in my eyes.
As long as you keep developing your own skills as a hacker, you'll still be a valuable hire for any corporate. Experience is experience - whether it be at someone else's company or your own.
> Please don't compare it with java, that makes me so sad.

I only do because Java has been the go-to year one language for colleges for the past few years. I wouldn't even mention it otherwise.

> I'm still trying to learn lisp and start doing some clojure too, can't wait!

Enjoy! I don't have a ton of Clojure experience, but from what I've seen, it's pretty awesome.
I did not read the prior blog article the author was referring to, but basically, the author complains much developer time/resources (money) went into implementing a freemium service's API, and then the freemium service essentially locked him in/extorted him (because of his development time/money spent implementing the no-longer-freemium API).
These are some really nice hints. I'd also stress out some pg also gives on the whole application process:

Drew' (from dropbox) application (good for a good example): http://files.dropbox.com/u/2/app.html

The video from Directed Edge founders: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=855057
Steve Jobs isn't just a CEO, he's the mentat CEO:

Above all else, the mentat must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his universe. He must remain capable of saying: "There's no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we'll correct that when we come to it." The mentat-generalist must understand that anything which we can identify as our universe is merely a part of larger phenomena. But the expert looks backward; he looks into the narrow standards of his own specialty. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop. It is to the characteristics of change itself that the mentat-generalist must look. There can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual. You must look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself: "Now what is this thing doing?" - The Mentat Handbook (Frank Herbert)
Go lang released 10-13
agreed. "trivial" is an overstatement but the essence of what he's saying is completely right.
They don't actually weild any power with which they could apply pressure, so its a bit of a moot point. I guess I was calling their purpose, as expressed by their completely ignored list, into question. I know people say that there is value in RMS being out there campaigining for our freedoms, but, again, with this list as evidence, it seems like no one takes him seriously. The distributions doing the most to bring free software to the public are censured by the FSF instead of being embraced.

Obviously, this isn't entirely fair, and the FSF is very supportive to those popular distributions an supportive of your use of any free software. But this new list seems destined to be as useless as the first.
Same here, not as nicely automated though (still need to actually type 'svn update').

What I really like is the ability to instantly roll back to any version.

Don't forget to block .svn directories in your apache config!
I love getting this type of insight from someone that was there during such an important time for Mint.

A couple of questions:

Authority. We got thought leaders in personal finance to back us.

Can you give one or two examples of how you guys accomplished this?

Dave had a the killer idea of the content network (blog) which was a HUGE traffic generator and still is to this day.

Do you mean the Mint blog or were there others? If others, how many of them?
Here is a fun one.

If you have multiple tabs, pinch any tab by its base and drag it down. Ooooooooh :-) icon previews of the sites :-)
Not at all. Just pointing out that if you've never commented before, you shouldn't make your first one an insult.
Zed rants on a Zed blog IS his marketing. When the product is server code and the consumer is other programmers, Zed posting effort-rants to HN for programmers to read is GREAT marketing. If your startup's target audience isn't other web developers then the type of marketing will vary, but it is still essential.
Goodness, I hope all the people using SVN to deploy are making sure that they're taking care of the .svn directories and the resulting security issues.
You could use a .htaccess file to prevent the .svn directory from being accessible, I would think
brings current in my spine.
Yep. After reading that I can't help but think dumping customers like him is a great idea. I suspect giving all accounts free access for 6 months and then charging them is probably the best way to avoid bums like him while still letting people use the service before spending anything.
Good point. I use a large drawing pad and sort of sketch out and arrange keypoints as I go along.

This recent HN item is relevant:
http://calnewport.com/blog/2007/10/08/monday-master-class-ho...
That's some crazy math and economics you got there.

First of all, revenues are not profits. That's not the money AOL gets to keep. AOL's expenses eat most of the revenues (http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:AOL&fstype=ii), even in good quarters.

But let's say, AOL had $2.7B. You add $500M-$1B to it. You are nowhere near the $10B you need.
"Horribly wrong"?

No money spent, no guarantees made... Sounds like you got what you paid for.

"Horribly wrong" would have been to make guarantees and pay money, and still end up with unusable crap.
This was definitely not the point of the article. It was to show how the decision making process @Chagify was flawed:

1) Chargify is not freemium to the customer.

2) Trust is important when you integrate and there are significant switching costs (plus recurring billing)

3) Do not blame your customers for incorrect assumptions.
A great reason not to offer a free product: people who are not paying you money will somehow find a way to feel like they have paid you money, just by being willing to talk to you.
Iirc correctly you wrote in an earlier thread that you were concerned with 'attention of a certain kind', so I really respect you for taking that risk.

It's long ago and I may misremember.
Can't seem to find an RSS feed for the new blog - the "feed list" link at the bottom of the page leads to 404.

Edit: Never mind; clicking on a particular post hooked my Chrome RSS extension - must just be missing from the home page.

Edit 2 (oy): The RSS feed is a bit of a mess; not very usable.
Vlad + Github
I beg to differ, I was going to update my fathers laptop to Windows 7 but he really needs office 2003 because his employees use it and most of their documents fail in office 2010. I've been wondering why, I know it's because they do something wrong with tabs and such but as a Word newb, I can't figure out what it is. This almost doesn't occur when he wants to use open office but of course other issues arise with OO.
The same logic suggests that Rails isn't really "free"; you have to do work to build a product on it. What does Rails owe its developers?
I think Ruby is a beautiful language but you really got to consider it in the context that it was invented in. Matz originally created it kind of as a spiritual successor to Perl, and it's original incarnation was as an easy to write, easy to read, fun to use scripting language. Rails came along later, I don't think anyone was really expecting it before it showed up, and it changed the Ruby conversation entirely.

Ruby is excellent in many ways but I feel like Matz never took into account what is needed for a group of programmers to work on the same code base. I don't want to say he completely dropped the ball or anything like that but stuff like monkey patching and other shenanigans that make life easier if you are the sole programmer working on a code base become problematic if you are working in a largish team where not everyone might know everything that is going on.

What I am trying to say is, IMHO Ruby "feels" like it is a good language to teach in, but you can end up using it for a really long time without acquiring programming discipline and fundamentals. If you start in C, for example, and you have to mess with malloc and pointers and stuff like that, you are forced to get that discipline, because otherwise stuff goes south really fast. Someone who starts in Ruby might never really understand the performance cost of initializing an object, or what the stack and heap is, or why it matters. I think it would be better for a new programmer to start out in C or even assembly for a little while, just to understand how a computer really works, then it becomes so much easier to understand why languages like Ruby and Python (and my personal favorite, Clojure) were created and how to use the abstractions that these more modern languages provide.
My chief concern with Chargify's new pay structure is that their lowest tier is perhaps a bit too high for those just getting started (both in price and in the # of users it lets you have). At the same time, I don't see any compelling reason (in the absence of evidence) for them to have a totally free plan.

I don't mistrust them for dropping the free plan; in fact, I now trust that they'll spend more time helping their paying customers.

And finally, Chargify is just as freemium as anything else. In our freemium service, those who have "free" accounts do us a service by providing us with data. You could say it's not "free," since they have to input data, but to take that argument to its extreme, you could say that HN isn't free because you have to type in the URL.
Wikipedia says CDMA uses 3 rates, 8.5kbps, 4kbps, and 0.8kbs at the sender's choosing. It averages about 6kbps, so the numbers are about the same. There are improved codecs, but I can't tell if they are in use.

The 0.8kbps is just for encoding background noise when the person is not talking.
Just a word of advice to anybody using this approach - make sure to setup Apache(et al) to not serve .svn folders and files or someone will be able to download your code. I've always used a release shell script that does an svn export and just replaces the entire directory.
this is a really great article and should be required reading for anybody thinking of starting up a company -- or considering joining a starup.
So, any speculation as to why jabber never replaced (or even really contended with) irc for developer chats?
I use a screen name that I use on other forums ("tokenadult" was a more appropriate screen name on the first forum where I used it than it is here on HN) and that screen name leads to my real-world identity by fairly easy steps. I like to think that that keeps me accountable for the quality of my posts. I have NOT linked my Wikipedia editor screen name (much newer than my HN screen name) to this recurrent screen name, although it is also linked by easy steps to my real-world identity.
Harj touched on it briefly last night at the NYC meetup, but I think that HN karma points are looked at as a bonus, rather than part of the criteria. Like all other aspects of the application process, it's just another chance for YC to get to know more about you.

When we applied, we had (and still have by most measures) low karma scores. But we also had a working product with actual users, so that worked in our favor.
Yes! I've made so many connections and friends, gotten job offers, made thousands off of freelance design work, and been offered a ridiculous amount of advice, because of Hacker News. And I only started posting around two months ago.

Definitely, yes.
The actual article is on http://www.gmp.police.uk/mainsite/pages/42B60B1DA0B3A6B18025... but I can't correct the mistake in posted link.
Rollover image on your website? That will be $80,000 (please)
I stopped reading after the author cited "salary costs alone" in developing the product as a cost paid by the customer of Chargify. They're disillusioned if they feel like Chargify is somehow responsible for these costs when providing a free product.
The flaw in the argument that there was lost dev time/resources because they can't use the free api is that the dev time is going to happen no matter which product you're using. The real cost is that if you want to still have a similar no-cost service, you have to put in the money (or time) to switch. How is this any different than if you had integrated with google maps and then they started spamming with ads so you wanted to switch to bing?

This type of complaining is without merit and just looks like grandstanding to further advertise zferral (look at us, we'll never let you down, never turn you 'round).
IAmA web site publisher working from home : 600-900K$/year
I assume they're `svn export`ing rather than `svn checkout`ing.
Correct (and good memory -- that was quite a while ago). Also a reason to use my handle as a primary name and put my real one behind a clickthrough.

That was also more of a concern when I was younger (and in gaming contexts -- hence a slightly fractured identity). These days I am confident in my ability to defend myself socially and physically.
I think my first introduction to "Turing tar-pit" style programming was trying to write an IRC client in mIRC script, which even sorta worked.
Yet I see at least one reference to `svn update`

I'm scurred.
US Students Drink Twice As Much Overseas
Are there any free/commercial sites with comparable datasets? I can see the data itself having a not-insignificant market value if it's of sufficient quality.
Mozilla's new CEO: Gary Kovacs
Using FAQs To Boost Conversions
Luckily, I was writing in personal finance for a few years before I joined Mint so I knew most of them. Some of them included Ramit at http://iwillteachyoutoberich.com, Cap from http://stopbuyingcrap.com and Jim at http://bargaineering.com to name a few.

We just went and interviewed the guys above or asked thme for guest posts. You have to think how to serve their interests (traffic / exposure / relationships with a potentially cool company).

Yea, the Mint blog.
IRC client running in background is non-obtrusive, while Jabber is primarily intended for IM, which means frequent distractions. I know many developers who do not use any kind of IM, while they frequently chat on IRC.
They'd be more likely to buy a car company. Which isn't going to happen either.

Steve Jobs doesn't clean gutters. He has designers find a way to make the gutters go away.
Show HN:  Instant Youtube playlist
http://playyourlist.com

A quick hack to take instant mania to next level, now create real quick youtube playlist and share with friends. Enter song names separated by comma and get your playlist instantly. Also continue adding songs later after comma.
Please let me know of your suggestions and spread the word if you like it.
http://playyourlist.com/
It could be nice to add luggage fees to this.
I'm not quite finished where I am now. :)
Some of them do, yes. For reference, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a NASA Lab, administered by Caltech. DARPA is a a funding agency and doesn't actually do any research itself. It generally employs only late-career scientists and engineers as program managers that hand out the money to researchers at actual labs at universities and companies.

iRobot was started by Rodney Brooks, at the time the most famous roboticist in North America and Director of CS and AI at MIT, and his students. This team has attracted a lot of good talent over the years. Now the team has broken up and there has been little interesting robot development for a while. But the intelligent robot industry is still very small, and the good grads have to go somewhere. Outside university labs, the hot job recently has been at Willow Garage.

(robot research prof here)
People don't need to start in C. If we required that, there would be many fewer programmers. In University, our CS department got people started in Java (not the best starter language, but certainly cleaner than C) but our required OS course was in C. So, after being introduced to programming in a somewhat simpler form, you were required to spend a semester writing big projects in C, and you learned about pointers and memory allocation really fast.

So, I agree that programmers should learn more about how these machines really work if they want to write good code, but I'm not convinced people should have to start at that level. Doing so would unnecessarily discourage people from learning to program. Imagine suggesting that everyone should learn to start programming in assembly. I think that's an analogous claim and is pretty silly. People starting to learn to program shouldn't be worrying about low level details or unnecessary syntax, they should be discovering the joy of creating programs.