skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The correct title is

"Don't stop when googling turns up nothing"

Googling for info is near optimal, it should not be abandoned. Sadly, I can get an answer from google quicker than I can from coworker.
You say you have a fine job and amazing pay. Why quit? I would quit when my startup is earning more than my current job.

What do you do when you are at home? You can spend your extra/free time on your startup until it grows big enough. At least you only have to work 8 hours a day. In my previous job I worked 9.6 hours a day :P

(Disclaimer: I quit my job almost a year ago but I have not gone fulltime doing web apps. I still enjoy coding while at home. I found a new hobby. :) )
Here's a relevant comment from a house editorial of The Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870367360457555...):

"Particular credit belongs to Chilean President Sebastián Piñera. It was Mr. Piñera who insisted on an all-out rescue effort, ultimately involving three separate extraction methods, when a more cautious (or fatalistic) politician might have feared raising expectations that could easily have been dashed.

Commentators have described his decision as a calculated political gamble, but to us it seems more like genuine statesmanship. Chile has historically depended on mining for much of its wealth. To keep faith with the men who go deep down into the earth to extract that wealth, as Mr. Piñera has, can no more be subject to a cost-benefit analysis than an army's decision to rescue its wounded or fallen soldiers from the battlefield. Deeper things are at stake."
IMO, the best way to compete with Google is to actually pay attention to your product. Outside a few core apps like search and Gmail, it astonishes me how little Google seems to care about their work once it's launched. They just sit there, accumulating dust for years until they get revamped or taken down. If you can launch a competitor that has frequent updates, builds a community, or really just conveys the idea that there's a man behind the curtain, I think you can do ok.

This doesn't help much with trivial webapps, and I'm not sure I feel good about other URL shorteners right now. But any product with some complexity will benefit from attention, and Google doesn't spare a lot of that for niche products.

Edit: word choice
It was also designed in the eighties to be used in university networks. The scale was a lot smaller back then.
For Linux, I personally separate the issues into two issues: "Hardware support is possible but doesn't exist", and "hardware support is impossible because the hardware vendor or standards bodies are either withholding documentation, failed to follow their own standards, or in some cases even actively fighting Linux developers". The "ACPI that only works in Windows" spent quite a lot of time in the latter case. If you had an IBM laptop that is now 6 years old, it probably fell into that category, based on the timing.

(A surprising amount of hardware fails to follow standards. I have a hard time laying the blame on Linux when that happens. I realize that as a user you may not care, but assigning blame to the proper entities is important if you want it to be fixed; cussing out Linus when in fact the hardware vendors are deliberately withholding specs may feel good but is not productive otherwise.)
I agree, its not worth thousands but it is worth > $0.

You must agree this investment by the integrating company makes them unlikely to leave.

A contract is worthless for a company in this situation. The cost of enforcing it is thousands as well.
Fix problems, don't just come up with ideas
http://code.google.com/apis/checkout/developer/Google_Checko...
I hear you... and I rather sign a contract than have this happen to me. Thing is... The TRUST factor is gone. When i have a contract signed that says my price or cost structure isn't gonna change then I don't need to trust.

At the end of the day... all press is good press and this is certainly getting a lot of attention. I'm sure they are having a good time! They may have to clean this mess up a bit but they will be fine.
Jabber rode the wave of "everything must be xml". Try debugging anything that's based on irc - you can do it using telnet (and/or tcpdump, if you need to see full client-server interactions). Now try doing the same for Jabber. Typing xml snippets into telnet is not pleasant.
The Lewis resignation: "an important moment in science history"
Yes. It helps keep me in check if I use my real name (or rather, an amalgamation of my real name) in online discussions.
Allow me to add another reason: If you use your real identity frequently to post insightful and interesting commentary, then it will overshadow anything less seemly you may have posted under your real name at some other point in your life. This can come in handy when a potential partner or employer Googles your name.
This is silly. The contract is simply the formal agreement you enter into with your provider. You don't get a contract so that you can sue someone; you get it so both parties actually know what they agreed to.

I assure you, most of your providers do not know that they've agreed that your software development costs are consideration for services they provide you.
I would expect that it can be reasonably easy fix (a few lines on the right places) to simply deliver some sane content as the result of the vote HTML query.

Shouldn't the referrer tag from the query be enough?
Exactly! I went through a lot of setups but I think I'll stick with this one for a long time. I also use it to implement GTD for my everyday life by creating different lists for different contexts.
Ask HN: Good text on neural networks?
Can anyone recommend a good text or online resource for learning about neural networks and machine learning? Some co-workers are using neural networks to solve some problems, and I lack the background to understand what's happening.
Of course. I feel as if you are arguing for the sake of arguing. It's not about their rights. It is my opinion that without consistent pricing (i.e. TRUST) its dangerous to rely on any company.
You are correct the larger of a 20 year protection from file date or 17 years from date of patent grant:

http://www.uspto.gov/inventors/patents.jsp#heading-5

For applications filed on or after June 8, 1995, utility and plant patents are granted for a term which begins with the date of the grant and usually ends 20 years from the date you first applied for the patent subject to the payment of appropriate maintenance fees. Design patents last 14 years from the date you are granted the patent. No maintenance fees are required for design patents.

Note: Patents in force on June 8, 1995 and patents issued thereafter on applications filed prior to June 8, 1995 automatically have a term that is the greater of the twenty year term discussed above or seventeen years from the patent grant.
Stackoverflow.com submission
I submitted a question and i got a blank page with the text:

Little slab of meat / In a wash of clear jelly / Now I heat the pan.
Show HN: Our SMS door buzzer using Twilio and TI Launchpad
I like your point about C, and I have a related point: When beginners see something that looks or reads like natural language, it activates the wrong part of their brain, and they start to wonder why the computer doesn't "understand" what they're telling it. The idea of a logical machine mindlessly executing symbolic instructions comes pretty naturally for some people, but for others, it's the first Big Idea in programming that they have to spend a lot of time getting used to. Every time they read a line of Ruby code that sounds kind of like stilted English, it causes a little regression in their brain back towards the mental model of the computer as something intelligent that understands the natural-language meanings of keywords and variable names.

Say what you want about BASIC, but programs like "10 ? "HELLO" 20 GOTO 10" never let you forget you were dealing with a brainless, inflexible automaton. Same thing with C.

With C, students are encouraged to ask the question, "What's really happening inside the machine?" There are simple, concrete answers based on a simplified view of the hardware. With Ruby, the answer to that question would be more complicated, and more importantly, it would be less concrete -- it's a long, long way to the hardware. C programmers start out grounded, at least grounded in a simplified model of the machine that is consistent and often helpful. How can beginners develop the habit of looking both up and down the ladder of abstraction, if they're looking down from the mountaintop into a shapeless gray cloudbank?
It is dangerous to rely on startups for a number of reasons. Managing risk is part of being in business.
It's legal, but taking the address and assigning directly to integers without a cast is anything but idiomatic.
That means that the server will run out of ports at roughly 65,000 clients.

I wrote the justin.tv chat server (which happens to be based on irc). A single one of our chat machines can handle about 120,000 concurrent connections. Available cpu is the limit, not number of ports.
A truly wonky and stupid protocol that could've been done so much better. Good grief. And I say this not just being a permanent IRC resident since over 10 years, but having written both an IRC client and a bot-of-sorts.
To answer the question of how many bankruptcies are caused by medical bills, you must compare a group of people with medical bills in excess of $1001 (or perhaps a gambling problem) to a similar group of people without medical bills/gambling problems/birth/adoption. If, (for instance), 50% of the first group and 49% of the second group goes bankrupt, then only 2% of bankruptcies are caused by medical bills. Without the control group, you have literally no idea.
I'm not a violent person. But patent trolls make me have visions of dungeons and medieval tools...

They're like parasites that try to find the optimal amount of blood that they can suck out of healthy businesses without killing them.

Novartis having the moral high ground in a lawsuit is rare enough that that alone should give you pause as to how low these people really are.

There are times that I wished I was a Catholic so I could condemn types like this - and mr. McBride - to hell.

Failing that, debtors prison would be fine with me as well.
Show HN: My side project, Instant Visual Search for Etsy.
I was inspired by Feross Aboukhadijeh's instant search for YouTube, so I took the latest Etsy API and built an instant search for them. I'd love it if you'd try it out and let me know what you think. It is at http://www.glancely.com/

I really hope it doesn't need an explanation, but start typing what you're looking for. I used tags on the listings (among other things) to fuel my suggestions. Click a color to filter on those listings, click to sort on price. Click again to deselect.

I've tested on the latest Firefox, Chrome and IE on Windows and Safari on an iPad. You will need JavaScript to run this as it is. I plan to build a no script (and non-instant) version later.

If I have a tl;dr from all this, it's "use jQuery" I've rolled AJAX/JavaScript apps by hand before and was really amazed at what jQuery enabled me to do so rapidly.
Clickable: http://www.glancely.com/
I've considered this, but I'm not sure how they would respond. If I'm open and tell them I'm not 100% committed to my work there, I'm not sure they'd still want me to work there anyway. I think I have to be prepared for the worst case if I even bring up part time with them.
Fair enough, I appreciate and thank you for your comments..
The situation in the UK, is that anything (and this includes fixtures, logos, statistics, even live twitter score updates) has to be licensed through a company called Football DataCo. The costs coming to ~$6000/season just for fixtures.
You can't even use names that sound similar. For example calling Liverpool 'Merseyside Red'. [1]

They enforce this strongly, outsourcing it to a company who only does this sort of thing.

[1] http://www.epltalk.com/2010-11-premier-league-opening-day-fi...
Bloodhounding Budgets
I've worked with STATS, Inc and XML Team. I've also implemented features against the Yahoo! Fantasy API and it was very nice to work with.

First off, you are going to have to deal with a rep.

STATS is the big name in the business and they feed, at least partially, many stat resellers from who you might be able to get cheaper rates. From there I'd say you should find a cheap service or a mechanism (scraping, etc) that gives you just enough data to work with and start building against it. Look at XML team for competitive pricing. If you get to the point where your app is past prototype, you should then investigate buying into the full service.

Depending on the day and the feed, wrangling sports data is awesome or horrible or both.

On the subject of scraping, I'm not sure what the legalities are. Obviously you are probably violating the TOS of any site you are visiting if you grab the data, but at the same time, strikes, balls and fouls are facts of the game.

Images and logos are sometimes provided by sports data brokers.

Take a look at http://www.stats.com/ and http://www.xmlteam.com/
In principle that's quite possible, but China hasn't had that sort of central planning for decades now. What China does do is use its redidency permit system to restrict many of the people who want to move to the cities from the countryside from doing so. This actually raises of the wages of Chinese workers from the $3-4 per day you'd expect given China's level of rural poverty up into the $5 per day range. If China were to become democratic of course there's no way the repressive residency system would last (that's what Item 8 of the Charter 08 is partially about) and the urban workers know this. Thus China tries to prevent democratic revolution (which tends to be urban) by coopting the urban workers.

EDIT: Edited a bit for clarity.

EDIT2: Actually, reading up on wikipedia it seems that most of the price controls weren't removed until the mid 90s, so I exaggerated when I said "decades". My bad.
Yeah, I'd have to agree. If we're going to say "there's a language that is more readable than others", then I guess Python's enforced "one way to do it" paradigm lends itself better to external eyes than Ruby does.

I guess Lisp'ers might feel similarly.

But it's all relative, everyone else's code is hard to read, at least for the first 15 minutes. By that time, you could have Googled 30 times over looking for the result.
Question: When you really need to get work done, where do you go?
I figured as much but wanted to ask anyway. btw. I looked at some old logs and GoogleBot indeed does 'the right thing': no funny characters in there.
Here's a list of installed 3rd party packages: http://godashboard.appspot.com/package

A lot of 3rd party packages are also listed at http://go-lang.cat-v.org/.

The goinstall command (http://golang.org/cmd/goinstall/) can automatically install packages from Google code hosting, GitHub, BitBucket and Launchpad.

The Go development process is very open, and a lot of contributions have been accepted from non-core developers.
How do you go about finding work usually?
Controller or Bust
Tell HN: Last-minute carpool to Startup School from Los Angeles
I have 1 seat left, if anybody still needs transportation. Leaving Fri ~10AM, back in LA by Sun midnight.
I suppose that makes me one of the smaller handful of people who's learned the IRC protocol while making an iPhone app (Mobile Colloquy). And I even liked it so much that I then had to go and do some work on a second implementation of it (for Justin.tv's app)!
I generally love priority inbox, but it doesn't do a good job of catching certain classes of mail that I need to read. (Mostly this is work-related email from some previously unknown sender with poor English skills--a regular hazard, for a grad student.)

I've solved this somewhat by changing the second panel from "Starred" to "Unread in Inbox". This way I can still choose to address only really important mail (top panel), but all non-spam mail makes it at least to the second panel, at least once.
It's true that that's the first step to programming as a craft, but it's hardly the first step to programming as a way of thinking, managing complexity, and building abstraction.

That's like saying the first step to flying an airplane is turning the ignition. Yes, that's true, but without a firm idea of what's going to be happening after that point you're only going to hurt yourself by turning that key. It's something that comes to head when learning to fly a plane/program.
No, the server is only using a single port - the one it's listening to. It's also already standard to run multiple, local relays per server instance in the case of IRCds. Many servers run multiple instances that together span 3 or 4 ports; 6667, 6668, 6669 etc.
Starbucks Enters the 'Tinkering' Stage
"For the first year and a half, none of Cataphora’s 13 employees received a paycheck."

Who works for these bozos? Employees, not co-founders.
If the patent really is 17 years old, one might be able to forgive the USPTO for letting this one get by, considering nothing like it existed at the time (Gopher was probably the closest thing). Now, on the other hand, I fully agree with you that the patent system is in need of very serious reform.
Nice never thought i'd get to mIRC.net, a site i am an admin on, through hackernews. There are several great RAW tutorials on mirc.net and mircscripts.org and in fact theraw section this blog post links too is an excellent reference point for all network deviations of the RFC's.
Microsoft Starts A FUD Campaign Against OpenOffice.org
good work. if only I'd had something like this when working on the IRC module for ayttm.
Ops O Google Chrome não conseguiu localizar News.YCombinator.com
What are you waiting for? Just try it! There are already many public packages (see http://godashboard.appspot.com/package), and a tool called goinstall. And there's tons of community involvement, if you'd have a look at the mailing list.
"Why am I speculating on solutions to problems that I am not sure even exist?"

It's called 'preventative maintenance.' You'll want to keep thinking about it.
Google used to be "the search engine for smart people".
Now, as it is the de facto standard, it is "the search engine for everyone".

That means when I search a part number it turns up a pop cd by serial number, when I ask for information on a scientific subject I get a 6 year old yahoo answers post, etc.

I realize now that, in the past, the most value I extracted from Google was finding good resources to refer to again in the future.

I've been considering writing a tool that, upon being queried, figures out 6-12 of the best resources available and googles within them for that query. Kind of the "Yahoo of Google" (back when yahoo was a directory based system)
Thanks for linking this. I've been working on ViewText as a side project. I'd love to hear feedback and ideas. Currently, you can request the content of an article in html, json, jsonp, xml, and pdf formats.

It also works on RSS feeds.
Finally Opera Has Decided To Support Extensions
I couldn't agree more.

In fact, in one of our products there is a specific feature that would be be extremely beneficial to our users. But we will likely never be able to implement it ... all because of such a troll that has gone after larger players in the space.
Which compiler to use for implementing code optimization ideas
Hi guys,

I am currently in grad school and had some code optimization ideas and wonder which compiler I should use to implement them. My first approach with modifying GCC was kind of discouraching as I found the source to be super complex and hard to modify. Can you share your mind?
We use Subversion as well. However, we use Ant scripts to do the build work. It makes updating our servers pretty straight forward.
Obviously the 80/20 numbers are pulled out of my rear, but I feel it's an accurate description. That 20% is different for each person, too.

For example, the last feature missing from OOo that I needed (and it's been reported, too) is styling for tables. Working with Internal API Docs, we use tables for parameter listings, and trying to make the tables readable and easier to use is difficult when you have to style each table individually.
He lives in Vancouver. It applies to BC Transit, but even more so to the TTC.
I think the main problem is there are very few consequences for patent trolls.

I consider this a form of extortion that our legal system is not structured to prevent (it actually encourages it). Invalidating and banishing all software patents would be a start.
But there's a six-year statute of limitations - a patent owner can sue [EDIT: for damages] for pre-expiration infringement up to six years after the infringement. (There may be potential wrinkles in the analysis if the infringement was an on-going one.)

EDIT: What the patent owner can't do after expiration is get an injunction against further infringement.
Good suggestion. Perhaps you need to hang around to help the new programmer for a couple of months to ensure a smooth handover?
Err, not really. You should be as portable as possible across different architectures. For example, on a 32-bit machine you can get away with using an unsigned int to represent an address, but that will break on a 64-bit machine.

The fact that the Linux kernel works on such disparate architectures also works against your point.
The Math Problem That A/B Tests Should Be Trying To Solve
Calling all HN types in East Texas:

Make damn sure to show up for Jury Duty.
StarCraft AI Competition Results
Interesting to see this surface again:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=474588

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=494066

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495561

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=918637

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1003875

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1674480
Hilarious. You get so angry at the poster and then quote the old Chargify pricing. Maybe you should take a look at the new pricing where it's closer to $0.50/customer, there's no unlimited ceiling over 15k, and the intermediate plans are gone.

As a paying Chargify customer, I can tell you that it pains me quite a bit to see my costs pretty much double overnight, with a big hurt on the way when I hit 500 and then 2000 customers.
Do not waste any time with gcc - go get LLVM and start hacking. It is a clear, clean, well-designed architecture with a lot of optimization passes already implemented, and there's a complete C front-end (called Clang) which either already does or is soon going to support C++ as well.
Good point, I think abstractbill nailed it with the XML, which would explain why there was never a good (or great) client. I remember having the client conversation when Jabber was growing, there were clients you could use but nothing that you really wanted to use.
I'm not sure if this is really about going to conferences or the lack of being able to delegate and communicate adequately back at the office.

There's also a huge gap here based on the type of business you're in. Ev and Mark Pincus sell, primarily, to consumers. But there's a whole class of businesses that sell B2B who do less then 10 (very large) sales a year. I've found that these businesses tend to gravitate to doing the conference circuit both as a great place to get in touch with a bunch of current and potential clients and as a place where, if you are a panelist or moderator, you can really raise your company profile.
Semi-related question: can anyone suggest a lightweight, easy-to-manage ticketing system that doesn't inspire hate? I've been seriously considering setting something like this up on my own server as a personal TODO tracker, but I don't know the space well.
Show HN: What do you think of my bootstrapped startup, www.opennearme.com
www.opennearme.com shows you whats open when you search.

Should I start marketing now, or is there some obviously missing functionality which will turn users away? (Beyond mobile-location integration, I know, I know)
MIT $100K / Morse Barnes-Brown Pendleton Elevator Pitch Workshop