skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How to Generate Web Traffic using Free Methods
Implementing a social or an e-commerce site requires skill if you don't want to deliver a me-too product that will utterly fail.

To be an entrepreneur regardless of the domain, you either have to have enough money to buy top talent or you need to be able to do the job yourself.

E.g. you will utterly fail to start a business that produces tasty eco-sausages if you have no idea how to: a) produce or buy eco meat or other ingredients and b) make tasty sausages or c) hire a chef working for a 4 starts restaurant that loves to make sausages

If you don't believe me, try it out.

Entrepreneurs that think coming up with an idea is enough, and "just need a programmer" are lying to themselves. But hey, they are free to try it out.
Excellent interview.

> Peldi started Balsamiq on nights and weekends, and now it’s supporting half a dozen families.

If that is not a real, tangible definition of a successful startup, I do not know what one would be.
I'll have no problem with that if it happens but, Matlab is so entrenched and they now have GPGPU computing in their products, I don't see them disappearing for a long long time. At least not in the field my lab is in. I don't think matlab is as prominent in many other sciences right now as it is in neuroscience. There are moves toward things like NumPy but the community seems reluctant.

EDIT: I'd like to see some uptake of clojure too. Things like Incater look interesting for scientific computing.
I really want to know what the other two things (besides Clojure) were that Rich thought about for a year.
Wow, who would have thought malware writers would be such low-lifes as to lie to us about their impenetrable security? I thought only marketers did that.
Yes great point - I have never understood why all branch's are only open whilst we are at work
I'm one of these guys.

Why didn't I learn to program? I had maybe an hour/day in between my job and my side hustle, and I just didn't have enough time to get through the problems in order to be a good programmer.

Since then, I've found that watching projects come to life, while learning on the side, has made it much easier to pick up Objective C, Javascript, Ruby, etc. Of course, I didn't expect programmers to work for free...that would be ridiculous.

That being said, it's kind of like learning HTML or CSS, unless you're doing it actively, full-time, for months or even years, it's going to take some time to feel like you know what you're doing.

Lastly, there are so many languages. There's Ruby, Python, PHP, C and its variants, etc. Do you learn web languages or something like Objective C?

Those are some of the things that went through my mind when I started.
Are there any forms of encryption which take a predictable and precisely defined amount of computing power to decrypt?

e.g. Some asymmetric so that I could encrypt something easily but then require someone who wants to decrypt the message to perform 100 Trillion operations to decrypt it?
I'm not sure what you mean by "TDD is the Cause of the bugs" - the TDD projects had 40-90% fewer bugs. Even if their remaining bugs would have been caught by test coverage of things that occur in live use, that's still a good result, right?
Being born and educated in Hungary is even better. Compare John von Neumann, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner.

They changed the education system, and no longer used the one they had around 1900. Unfortunately.
Netbeans has very good JavaScript support and in browser JavaScript debugging. It is the only one I know of so far that does in-browser debugging. VS and IE do but IE's debugger is primitive. Netbeans allows you to debug and trace through the entire stack in one location. I went through a lot of them Aptana, Eclipse, et. al. and found that Netbeans provided the best JavaScript development tools in my opinion.
You have to radically reduce your expenses if that is the case.

Are you tracking your monthly expenses? I assume rent is the highest, can you take in a room mate? Move into a smaller place? Sell your car and buy a beater?

I took 3 months off (not for a startup, I went skiing the whole time) for <$4,000. I can save that up in 3 months of working, but I drive a 10 year old car and rent a small apartment while most of the guys I work with are driving $30,000 cars and living in big places. But the car doesn't matter to me nearly as much as the freedom to take time off.
I fail to see how unit tests are required for a shippable product. For a wide range of things, buggy and shipped is better than clean and ready in 3-6 months.
I think he did a great Job! Go Ben!
I know many (as in, 10+) people who started a company and
got utterly fucked for the next decade, maybe two,
because of its failure; and all they have to show for it
is a period on their CV that they have to make excuses
for at any interview they go to.

Why make excuses? Talking about that experience opens the door to discussing just how well suited you are for the job you're interviewing for.

Q: I see on your resume you spent ten years at example.com which does not seem to exist any more. Tell me about that.

A: Starting up example.com was an amazing experience. After ___ years at ______ company I decided that I really wanted to try starting and running my own company. [Overview of the main ideas and pivots of the various things he tried].

Unfortunately I learned that I just not strong at some critical business skills like ______ and _____ though I did hone my ______ and _____ skillset [where these two are relevant to the job you're interviewing for].
Anatomy of Failed Startups (or what I've learned in 15 years)
The best such usage I find is to activate the camera. Just feels more natural.
The 10 Most Creative Small Businesses
So, essentially:

a) given that people has made bad arguments before
b) it "seems relevant" to make bad arguments in the opposite direction now

Huh?
Unique and persistent identifiers for Internet resources
JSMentors.com: JavaScript Mentoring Mailing List
Aren't your four bullet points arguments in favour of training? Just not in favour of hiring a dedicated in-person trainer. But setting up a system to disperse knowledge and allocate time for helping each other out seems useful.
Me too. I can't find someone with idea, no matter how stupid, no matter how hard I try. Going to 'networking events' usually yields dozens of business cards of people who want to sell 'services' to 'local businesses' (design, legal, accounting, market research, whatever...) but they all just want to get paid by the hour - let along that one of them could come up with an idea.

So that causes the situation where you have 30 or 50 people all trying to sell each other the same services, with nobody who can actually create anything new.
'Speed wasn't that important: Python made up 20% of the top 100.'

In the article, speedy execution can be taken to mean the speed/ease with which you translate you idea into code and not the speed at which the resulting code runs
Is this the Next Craigslist? 
Found this on PRWEB on a New Classifieds Site. Doesn't seem to say what the shake-up is!
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/11/prweb4833654.htm
I like the style, just not the execution.

Nothing wrong with having stuff...nothing wrong with wanting it.

I'll live frugally when I'm dead.
Employee Loyalty–Would You Go Without Pay for Weeks or Months?
Internet disrupted partially in India
Great List!
Vladimir Safonov's Trustworthy Compilers is another good reference on this subject, in addition to the books already mentioned here on HN. Safonov works through some examples of real-world languages, and argues why hand-written parsers are superior to Yacc-style parser generators. He gives examples of ALGOL-68 and FORTRAN.

I don't know of any definitive text that covers a wide range of practical examples that I've been totally satisfied with, though. Even Safonov waives his hand a little, saying the parser is the one part of the compiler to be written by the most experienced and best compiler engineer on the team, because it influences the performance of everything after.
10 D.C. Start-Ups You Need To Know About
The downside of high valuations
Financial Planning For Physicians
Camels and Rubber Duckies (Thoughts on pricing from Joel on Software)
Call me an optimist, but this just might easily be one of the most significant scientific breakthroughs of our time.
I feel like Clojure has crossed that threshold for me.

I program in Java at work because it's what my team understands and it's what the rest of the application is written in. But if I need to do some exploratory programming or build tools to increase my personal productivity, I turn to Clojure first. It's much more productive because I can test each little piece at the REPL and it takes so much less code than it does to do the same things in Java (even when it is just invoking methods on Java objects).

If I need to, it is then a straight forward step to expand the code out into its verbose Java form.
Review my project: notefeeder
http://notefeeder.heroku.com

note feeder lets you save notes and urls from your current page and turns them into RSS feeds so you can quickly access them later.

I use it to tag pages I want to finish reading at home, or things that are blocked at work. Its also handy if you share your feed urls with friends or blog readers so they can see things that your liking at the moment.

I wanted the user to be able to do all this without having to ever visit the site(after the initial login).

* I found a similar site after I finished mine which was disappointing but I would still really appreciate peoples thoughts or criticism.
To the downvoter, it's a valid question. FTP needs to go away, it's just a crap protocol that is totally out of place on today's internet.
It's a great analogy if for no other reason than that it frees your mind to think about more important things than stuff.

If we keep at hand only what we regularly need, and put the rest 'in storage', we'll probably be able to spend a lot more time doing the things we actually want to get done.

Take advantage of the division of labor and let someone else curate your stuff for you. Go do something interesting.
Blood pressure drug could help weight loss
The VacuPractor Is Revolutionizing Lower Back Pain Relief
A reply from a lawyer would be ideal, but since the rest of us are affected by the legal system, I do think some attempts to understand it are worthwhile.

Here's a link to argue against me, but does it apply after the patent is granted, or only before? There's presumption of validity after.
http://patents101.com/2009/03/date-of-invention-first-to-inv...
What are your arguments? He is right the US is first to invent. I think he is wrong in the claim to have invented it earlier bit is easy, the repo commit time line(and mailing list emails etc.) would give a firm date which the claiming party would have to have proof of inventing before. That is to say it isn't like a criminal case where only one side has to prove anything both parties have to prove invention dates.
Eye Movement Patterns in Web Design
True that interviewing is a resource hog and the post nicely articulates the problem. But I don't think it really counts as a technical debt, if it were you would gain something from it in the short run. For example, by not testing your code you have a short term gain (faster deployment), but accrue long term debt (slower development time as the % of new code vs existing functionality becomes smaller).
Runner Crawls to Finish to Win Title for Her Ailing Coach
I can't speak from personal experience, so I'm not going to offer advice based on my experience.

But, do listen to the Mixergy interview with Jason Jacobs of RunKeeper -http://mixergy.com/runkeeper-jason-jacobs-interview/ - he started working with contractors. There's some real pearls of wisdom in there.
Gawker Is A Blog. Just Like Twitter.
Another reason to employ multiple backup techniques. In this case, raw partition backups would have probably saved a lot of worry (although they wouldn't have got rid of the original vulnerability, which is arguably more important).
Wordpress Affiliate Plugin « Web development & SEO: VellumWeb
50 Great Web Design Tools That Should Be In Your Toolbox
> "if you lost years of your life and have nothing to show for it"

That's kinda how I feel about corporate gigs. You have stuff to show for it, but there comes a time when you realize most stuff doesn't really have lasting value.

And to those who suffer a bad gig to have money to do the things they really love: well, it's funny how little money most of those things really require.
The Book Cover Archive
A lot of banks actually do have private teller areas for big cash transactions, usually in the commercial area, which may have a separate entrance.
If the patent is granted, then any litigant bears the burden of proof in disproving it. The cost of patent litigation is sufficient that any institution would have difficulty pursuing such a case to that point, much less a group of volunteers that maintain an open source project.
I think it rocks. Scrolling through was a great user discovery process and the story/art combo had me hooked.

I really don't have a need for the service (maybe I do, not sure), but I do like watching the way people market their services. This is something unique...well done.
Frustrated web designers let client know where he can shove it (funny video)
The idea of the site is interesting and the pictures are great, but I strongly object to any website that hijacks the standard method of navigating websites in order to move the user through images. When I press Command-left arrow, I should move backwards through my browser's history. I should be shown the previous photo in a series.
Hypergraphia: Optimistic Replication
Oh well... It's clear the USPTO isn't doing any reasonable homework in approving patents, but this issue in particular isn't that troubling because there is clearly prior art. Sounds like these companies are just wasting their money on something that will never actually be useful.
Could backfire you. There's no guarantee that this is a home-run to get a job. Keep that in mind that the world is not "ideal".
Wikileaks ousted by Amazon after pressure from US Government
Google Cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QzG7EHf...
A steampunk record player.
But is buggy and shipped in 3-6 months or clean and ready in 3.25 to 7 months better? (that's what the time increase numbers are from TFA).
The only real complaint I have about bank branches is the long wait times, seemingly at all hours of the day. My credit union has recently started providing an express line in addition to the regular line. If you're there for a relatively quick transaction (e.g. simple deposits or withdrawals) you can jump in that line and get finished much more quickly.
>Surprised to hear about ATT. I know in the past I've tried and was stuck with EDGE.

I suppose the phone you tried might not have had AT&T 3G frequencies. Most unlocked phones out there don't.
Yes .. also I love how Balsamiq used the word 'lifestyle business' in such a positive way. I have only heard it as a way to write off bootstrapped startups otherwise.
Please review my startup - Vipidme.com - a video generator
A couple of weeks ago we launched http://vipidme.com.

It is a webapp where you can create your own customized video using our predefined templates. Currently you can only customize textual information, but we're working on new features like the possibility to upload your own pictures and audio files to use in the templates.

Video rendering turned out to be very expensive, but at the same time we wanted for new users to try how it all works, for free. So we included a possibility to produce one low-res video for new users. Making more videos or higher resolution costs money, starting from $2.

We are aware that English on the website sucks, but none of us knows English well, so we planning to find native speaker who will fix that.

We would love to hear your feedback.
Thanks.

DEMO: http://vipidme.com/watch/1020f3685f8e68a933d8bcd33a95a1cdafa2/
Why does it go on about running homebrew when that is something you cannot do on a 360 by just changing the optical drive's firmware (which is what they state he was doing)?

Well, technically you could flash the optical and then use King Kong's unverified shaders along with some old exploits to get to running homebrew, but it is not really realistic.
x86 is cache-coherent; we can directly modify code at runtime and expect things to work.
Ask HN: Advice on software contracting 
I'm in talks with another company that would like to use me as a contractor to build mobile applications for "their brand". We had tentatively agreed to a ballpark _fixed_ price--we haven't signed anything yet. However, there are 3 issues that are emerging:

* Their concept of what features they "want" in their apps is extremely vague. I don't think they're being deceitful (planning to dump additional features on me at the last minute). Rather, I think they genuinely don't have a vision for what they want and they would simply prefer that I "take care" of almost everything (more on this below).

* Despite the lack of a _specific_ vision for what they want, there has already been some "feature-creep" and I'm concerned that the addition of features will blossom if we consummate the deal. The feature-creep is compounded by the fact that the feature requests are not fleshed-out, so when I see a new feature request I'm left wondering "How much will it take to implement Feature X?" When I ask them for additional detail, it's clear that they don't have a clear vision of what they want.

* It also seems that they would prefer it if I just ran/maintained the applications on my own (they don't want to be bothered with the technical headaches). However, these applications require at least 1 remote server (the applications will routinely query a remote database), so what initially seemed like a "build us some mobile apps" contract is turning into a "build us some apps and an infrastructure and maintain everything" contract.

My gut instinct is to convert this into an hourly "pay as we go" contract. However, I don't want to completely turn the tables on them over the fixed price and I'm trying to come up with a hybrid approach. I'd like to structure something that protects me against feature-creep and something that protects them against slipping deadlines.

So, my questions are:

1) any general advice on how to proceed?

2) Has anyone structured contracts like this: "I'll build you a piece of software with features X Y Z. I expect that it will take me 6 weeks of full-time work and I will charge $A. Any additional feature requests or revisions beyond those features are billed at $B.

Thanks for any insight!
ISO 27001 - BS 25999-2 Certification Process
Designing for Content Management Systems
Janice Roberts, Mayfield Fund, on Mobile Sector Venture
Thank you. I could've phrased it better, but it was serious.

Everyone knows it's unencrypted and HTTP is faster for simple file serving. Right?
Online Git Training
Ask HN: Where do you find good tech talks?
I've noticed that there are a lot of great talks recorded on Blip.TV, but I can't seem to find anything decent through their search :-/

I used to watch almost every Google Tech Talk, but they seem to have stopped posting them as often, and the subjects are also less intriguing.

Where do you find good tech talks? Here is a list of the resources I follow at the moment:

Google Tech Talks - http://research.google.com/video.html

ConFreaks - http://confreaks.net/events

Pivotal Tech Talks - http://pivotallabs.com/talks

StartupSchool at JustinTV - http://en.justin.tv/startupschool/videos

InfoQ presentations - http://infoq.com

Stanford Entrepreneurship Corner - http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html

Business of Software - http://www.businessofsoftware.org/prevyear.aspx - Click "Show more"

Learnivore screencasts - http://http://www.learnivore.com

VideoLectures - http://videolectures.net/ - Machine Learning, Statistics, NLP, ..

MediaPostLive at UStream - http://www.ustream.tv/user/mediapostlive - Digital Marketing

TED Talks - http://ted.com - General

What else am I missing? Should Learnivore include the listed resources? Should we make another aggregator just for Tech Talks? Did somebody already do it? Thanks
The Art of the Mulligan and Game Outcomes
It might be valuable to enumerate for which exact reasons you need this "biz guy" and really ask yourself if you can't do most of it yourself, at least at the beginning. I'm a designer/developer and I sold ads and did a lot of business development for my startup for over a year before we were acquired. It's amazing how much stuff a smart person can get done (that's out of their comfort zone) when they really, really have to.
Facebook places does this through their deals system, but you still have to manually check in. The only location service I know of that is always on is google latitude, but it's accuracy isn't always perfect.
Web Apps that will help you grow your Business in 2011
The techdirt author obviously didn't bother to read the comments on the slashdot article outlining the second claim.

The IBM patent lists the coder's software as prior art. If they were stealing the idea, they obviously wouldn't do that. They're patenting enhancements that aren't in the coder's software, although the difficulty of reading patents makes that difficult to distinguish.
I'd guess that there's some irreducible complexity that leaves the number of key traits to excellence at X > 1.

If you figure it out, though, be sure to report back.
Here's Mozilla's linked post on this, from March of this year - http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2010/03/31/plugging-the-css...

To support your statement, I haven't found anything saying this has been removed.
How true is this commnent? I'm not in the VC/Startup world anymore so I can't validate this statement:

Truth – Capital Chases Entrepreneurs, not the other way around. Invest all your energies in building a GREAT business. Everyone will be ringing your doorbell.

but it doesn't smell quite right to me. You gotta network to tell the VCs about your idea to get them excited, and THEN doorbells start ringing...but just build it and they will come? Sounds naive.
Err, clickable:

http://research.google.com/video.html

http://confreaks.net/events

http://pivotallabs.com/talks

http://en.justin.tv/startupschool/videos

http://infoq.com

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html

http://www.businessofsoftware.org/prevyear.aspx

http://http://www.learnivore.com

http://videolectures.net

http://www.ustream.tv/user/mediapostlive

http://ted.com
Just a heads up that the grey font on black background is pretty hard to read on my (albeit crappy) monitor.
Is a next-generation firewall in your future?
When I try to subscribe with my email, I get to this page here:
http://skillsapp.com/subscribe/
which is blank, you might want to look into that. :)

Happening with FF 3.6.12 and Ubuntu.
Even if this worked for nationwide wifi, I wouldn't want it. WiFi is a horrible protocol for wide areas... and that's why it wasn't designed that way. Intel's version of WiMax, despite it looking like LTE is the 4g winner, is more analogous to what nationwide WiFi should be.
Quiz: Are You a Tron Wizard?
This is definitely going to be the next billion dollar company.
Yeah, I think the programmer version of this is "I've got a great program/site, I just need someone to sell it!".
Oddly enough, the site is down.
Halliburton actually tried to patent patent-trolling: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081107/0118162765.shtml
Stirling engine powered by the heat of a hand.
There's a lot more on Stirling Engines on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine
The vast information required to do "reasonable homework" on software patents makes me hesitant to blame the USPTO. I blame the rest of the system for not making it clear that such patents are nonstatutory.
This has been around since at least 2006: http://crypto.stanford.edu/sameorigin/
Gundo - Visualize your Vim Undo Tree