skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Steve Job's is also a non-programmer - the success of Apple is his vision and the ability to direct people to achieve that goal."

Well, that and Wozniak's 1337 skills at hacking.

The real benefit of having a great hacker cofounder isn't the work they do themselves. It's that they can recognize and attract other great hackers to work for them, and that they're respected enough that those other hackers will give their best effort and not cynically slack off. You think that Jobs could have attracted Burrell Smith and Bud Tribble and Andy Hertzfeld alone if they weren't working with Woz? Or that he could've hired John Lasseter at Pixar without Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray?
Geek, usually in jeans and a t-shirt. More to the point, I'm asocial enough that it's going to be a challenge to do any face-to-face communication I need to do to make my startup work. We'll see how that works out. :)
this is exactly what I am talking about. Thank you for the scientific expose.
As if there weren't enough empty space to begin with...

That reminds me of this article about the futility of space colonization, which describes how empty space is. I think you really have to watch/read lots of Sagan or do some deep thinking to really fathom how empty it is.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...
AdSense was at least partially an acquisition. Video became YouTube. Froogle is largely a failure. Considering how many programmers Google has your argument that they're good at producing stuff in-house is pretty weak. They're great at scaling and running stuff, but so far they don't seem to be very much better at creating new great things than any big company is.
This is hilarious. Sun is the only company that hasn't figured out a way to make money off Java...this won't work either.
6 Easy Tips to Prevent Downtime
Nice always been a faithful follower of Jquery.
Sure, why not? Can you ask whether someone's an alcoholic or a drug user during an interview? Of course not. Can you ask whether they're married? No.

Well, you can bullshit only so much in FB before your friends call you on it. And who knows you better than your friends?! So I'd be more worried about being fed bullshit during an interview than looking at a social site.
Impressive is all I can say.
Okay, I added reply counters to each conversation and a counter for how many discussions a certain chain has. Much easier to figure out when someone's started a conversation.

I also cleaned up the chain display page. Now when you look at a chain page, a chain link only shows up if it has a post with more than 10 letters. That way, you can always read interesting content from other people without seeing blank chain links.

Removed the not-safe-for-work chain from the front page. ;)

I've accentuated some little things. What do you all think about the redesign?
If they're having difficulty filling inventory, raising more cash to hire more salespeople seems like a reasonable course of action...

I'm surprised we don't see more inter-network wholesale deals-- when one company's sales volume is low, resell the excess inventory at a discount to another network!
Yay, more politics.
And this is hacker news why?
At least twice you say that they weren't stupid or ignorant, as if I said that they were. :)

My post was clear-as-daylight a counter-example to Paul's statement, not an attack on Reddit.

You can even see my second sentence said, "there are likely smart guys working for IBM, _as well_." But, now people are going to think I hate Reddit or YCombinator because I disagreed with PG...
"You're assuming IBM programmers don't make stupid mistakes"

No; my whole point was that, that's right, we don't know who's making more stupid mistakes, one way or the other.

"I think startups generally have much better programmers, but their work is so geared towards speed that security comes second. That probably just means the level of security vs IBM is a draw."

That's exactly why I disagreed with PG, because it's probably a draw.
Don't try the functional while block at home: Python doesn't handle tail calls efficiently, so you'll take up O(number of iterations) memory, and you'll exceed the allowed maximum recursion in long loops.
Now taking this question from a different angle... Suppose the striving programmer has chosen to start learning python.

What steps would you take to start (are there any one click installers like there are for ruby? other things? tips for beginners). If you were doing it again, what would you keep in mind?
Drop me a note, if you've got good ideas, I'm interested. No commitments, but if something strikes me, we can work it out.
I've been using SCMs for close to a decade and I really like git and I recommend it to a lot of competent devs. But there are some issues that irk me too much about SCMs ad they're fundamental enough to make me wanna start something that fixes these issues.

Anyone else interested in transforming SCMs? Contact me (info in profile).
Angel investment scene in Australia
What's one of your fundamental issues with SCMs?
these evolutionary explanations aren't falsifiable and therefore belief in them is as rational as belief in any explanatory heuristic you can dream up, always salvageable by postulating whatever new ad-hoc assumptions can help the theory. besides, if men are hunters, and hunters want meat, and meat is reddish-pink, then men should go for that color too, right?
It just so happens that the origins of human civilization as we know it are "eurocentric".
This isn't very good science. There are plenty of alternative conclusions the data supports just as well as the one they chose. So saying they did science to support their conclusion is false.

For example, they didn't even bother to try a control: do the same thing but fill the booths with non-food. Maybe the food was irrelevant.

Or maybe the men were just more bored while doing the experiment, perhaps for cultural reasons. They didn't test for that either.

etc
If I understand it right, you are sending the timezone info back to the server? If so, why does the server need to know at all? Just use that info to set the background of the 'today' calendar cell in the client side.
Scott Rosenberg: Bridges and code
"Quickly" must be a relative term. Steps 3 & 4 would take you about 10-15 min on a really complex pic like they use in the example (hair is always hard to do with a pen tool).

PS built-in tool and Mask Pro (http://www.ononesoftware.com/detail.php?prodLine_id=4 ) are the best and fastest ways to do this. You can do this task above in about 1 min with the right tool.
Because hackers do/read things other than hacking. Get over yourself.
To determine which range of dates gets shown and to calculate the number of days in your current streak. I guess could do the latter on the client, but what if it's Aug 31st in CA and Sept 1st in MA and the user is in month view? I'm not yet ready to go all js.
In my case I found the latter.

I used to be excited about unit tests because of the promise of being able to make bolder changes to the code with certain confidence. And I feel the practice of making my code more testable improved my design skills.

But I found they are a maintainability issue too. They increased the cost of making the type of changes that would require me to change the tests- and normally, changes that don't break interfaces don't worry me a lot even if I don't have tests. Also, relying on the tests for a sense of confidence made me lazier about trying to really understand why the code worked. In general, it put my head in the mode of seeing the trees rather than the forest. YMMV.

Nowadays I write the code as if I was going to unit test it, and then I don't write the tests. When I do, I don't make much of a point of keeping them around; I use them basically as shortcuts to poking around in the REPL while I debug something. I try to keep things simple enough that not much can go wrong, I try to make sure I really understand how and why it works, and I try out most representative use cases I can think about.

That's enough to keep my debugging time quite low. When I do have bugs, I treat them as learning experiences: I try to understand why it happened and what can I do so I don't get more of those.
First Coders at Work interview done
So you think painter and writer are derogative too?
Does it matter if you formulate your classes in assembly?
I'm in the same boat - a recovering 'ideas guy' who buckled down and actually learn to hack over the past year or so. (One of the best decisions I've ever made. Though, granted, I developed a real passion for it.) I'm enjoying Ruby/Rails, but will probably check out Python next, because so many smart people seem to gravitate to it.

BUT, that said, I'm going to commit hacker heresy and recommend that you consider starting with Javascript. Here's why:

Hackery reasons:

- it's how I learned object-oriented programming

- it's how I learned functional programming. (well, ok, a little bit of Scheme helped, too.)

Practical reasons:

- in any project, no matter what the backend is, you're always gonna need JS on the front end

- with the rise of rich UIs (ajax and whatnot), people who really know their JS are in demand, and it's a niche that most hackers don't focus on

- you can learn from studying thousands of other real-world programs. (when you see something cool on some website, just pop open the hood -- or, rather, pop open firebug -- to see how it works.)

- it's the layer that's closest to the user. this forces you to keep everything in context while you hack.

- you said you're a good listener. empathy is key to UI design, so you might find this to be a good place to mix your strengths with code.

Ok, now all you real hackers can tear me apart for recommending a toy language. ;-)
This is a simple case of specialization of labor. While a hacker may be able to hear the voice of the customer, it probably makes sense to have some folks that do more hacking and some more customer hearing. If you have two co-founders, it makes sense to have one on each side.
perforce (adverb):

of necessity; necessarily; by force of circumstance.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/perforce
I'm in Europe...
it is a really cool idea. could be a lot of fun. social experiments are great.
what? i'm not the only one with a backup pr0n plan?

i'd be so rich right now, if it weren't for these bullshit scruples.
uh, so... does anyone know what they DO online?
Think display technology will get this far in twenty years?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo_QVq2lGMs (Music video for Justice's D.A.N.C.E., it is stylized images of people wearing animated t-shirts.)
Hm... Do you like to build something like a... robot that goes around and... huh... does stuff for people that people themselves don't want to do?

I am sorry, but most of the ideas I hear from non-tech people are pretty much like that :-)

Man, you have to realize that ideas worth nothing. Seriously: ZERO.

What counts is the best possible implementation. Facebook is not the first social network and google wasn't the first search engine.

Sorry to disappoint.
Matt Maroon: Demo Day B and Beyond
Another perspective on Iran
Actually he is more confused than that. He uses a poor analogy with animals who can never do stupid stuff because they can never do anything new in the first place. They are not into creation just procreation.

Now, the analogy to really use is evolution. Evolution tries a lot of stunts but not every creation lives, most die in the process and the some that survive are well adapted to the system. Is evolution pushing useful resources off the cliff. Is evolution moronic?
Did reddit disclose that the pwd was being stored plain-text?

If they had, it probably wouldn't have bothered people much.
Part of the problem is that "Web 2.0" still doesn't really mean anything.

When that article says Web 2.0, it vaguely means any web application developed by a small company in the past year or two.
"... scientific expose ..."

It's not scientific it's empirical observation and hardly an expose.
So... where is it? Where's the interview?
C# 3.0 To Be Dynamic Language
20 Free and Fresh Icon Sets
I'm not 100% sure of the license for some of these icon sets, so buyer beware!
I'm not completely sure of the license on some of these sets, so you'd be best off sending an email to the author before using anything in a commercial environment.
they look for Men
Those Expensr guys seem to have done a nice job of implementing one of the ideas I had been mulling around.

www.expensr.com for those who didn't read the article.
Design Float: A digg/reddit for design articles
Here is another: make sure one hard drive failure won't bring down your service.
Paypal guys are at it again with Slide
PG -

Holding the program in your head "scales" - at least on well-constituted teams. I was a chief/architect (based on Fred Brooks' chief programmer team concept, long time ago) and was able to utilize some "ordinary" programmers and a couple gifted programmers by doing the highest level abstracting of the problem so they could each hold a sub-problem in their heads. Made the bosses happy, since there was less reliance on any one person, and I was largely replacable by one of the more gifted team members.

(BTW - greetings from anotehr Gateway-survivor)
Me too... http://www.habitstarter.com/

Do I win any points for having had the idea before the Seinfeld article was published? :-p
Me too, and I had to rush mine out the door also :)

http://www.habitstarter.com/
BBC to launch Backstage developer network for interactive TV
Slideshows that don't fade in and out are pointless.
Now That The iPhone Can Be Unlocked, Will Apple Try To Block The Hack?
Twelve SEO Mistakes Most Bloggers Make
Perhaps he'll write a book with them in it...
JamStudio: the web music factory
Fossil find pushes human-ape split back millions of years
Paul, you were on the internet for 13 years before your sold your first startup? And you have five degrees? Yet you want 20-year-olds to succeed in 6 months if possible, even without a degree? That's insane (in a good way.)
Oops, yes. No need to submit stuff already on the Library link at the bottom of the site.
We'd actually prefer if it took longer. If you succeed in 6 months, it was probably an early acquisition, and YC doesn't make very much from those.
Writing Hacks, Starting
http://store1.yimg.com/I/bugbear_1850_80296
"when people can't start they're imagining the precision of the end, all polished and brilliant, a vision that makes the ugly clumsy junkyard that all beginnings are, impossible to accept"
No, I don't believe so, at least not until after the scandal broke.

It's trivial to find out though, for any website - do a "Forgot password" retrieval, and if they send you the password itself, it's stored in cleartext. If they send you a link to reset it, it's hashed.

IIRC, Reddit, MySpace, all LiveJournal clones, and IMDB all store in plaintext. Drupal installations hash them.
Yeah!
Much better!

I'm a fan of Katty Sierra and always read her creating passionate users blog.
It's so bad that she isn't posting anymore.
You got a point there.
We still have different opinions about that issue, but you're right, FB could be a tool, some people use it, some don't.
One last question:
Do you think is important having a FB profile?
What about 2 candidates for a job, but only one has a FB profile.
Will that affect your decision?
My favorite is Viaweb's last press release. We actually issued this, a few days before the Yahoo deal closed. It was the culmination of my press-release writing career.

http://www.bugbear.com/laspresrel.html
I'm surprised no one caught the rather bad statistics mistake:

"Today's human population is descended from twice as many women as men... To get that kind of difference, you had to have something like, throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced. "

If you really had only half as many men reproducing as women, you'd get the twice-as-many-women-descendants after a single generation. For the ratio to be 2:1 over the whole of human history implies that it was a much milder, but still systemic, bias. It may or may not be anything evolutionary, though.
"Harvard University, founded in 1638, is the leading supplier of education and scholarship worldwide. Its flagship product, the Harvard University PhD degree, is the scholarship industry's leading enterprise-wide scalable information management solution. "
I have seen the same thing. Typically I have half a dozen doc tabs open and sometimes I have a calendar tab open but not too often.

What I really hate is when I have 10 tabs open and I have to restart FireFox because it is over 1 GB of virtual memory: I don't want to have to reopen all of the tabs again. So I use Process Explorer to kill off FireFox. When I restart it, FireFox gives me the chance to restore my last session, which I do. FireFox is then back running again with all of the tabs that were there when I killed it and memory usage is down to a fraction of what it was before.
Outward Bound, Looking In
Everything they buy they do a huge amount of work on, and they don't merely scale; they add features. Google Video was already easily superior to YouTube for the player alone (actual random access); they bought YouTube for its audience. YouTube got so big because unlike GV, it was very lax at policing commercial content. Its poor video quality, lack of download facility, lack of fast-forward, and short clip length limits should not be confused with the killer feature of giving other people's stuff away.

Froogle a failure? It's a search engine for product prices.
I wonder about the kind of cognitive access a programmer has to their program once it's loaded. Descriptions of walking through a building imply that moment-by-moment the programmer is only dealing with a subset of the problem, although the whole thing is readily available in long-term memory. He's thinking about the contents of a particular room and how it connects with the other rooms, not conceptualizing the entire house and all its relationships at the same instant. I imagine this is necessarily the case, since short-term memory is limited. If true, this imposes limitation on the topology of the program, since the connections between different parts are localized and factorizable X when you walk out of the bedroom you don't immediately find yourself in the foyer. Consequently, problems that can't be broken down (or haven't been broken down) into pieces with local interactions of sufficiently limited scope to be contained in short term memory will not be soluble. Does this make any sense?
I'm constantly amazed by how incremental people are in creating webapps. The long tail is an interesting concept but why is the digg/reddit concept for a specific niche being so thoroughly flogged to death? Is each site really grabbing big enough traffic numbers to make it a worthwhile pursuit?

How can we break ourselves of the herd and copy+features methods of problem solving?
I don't think this was supposed to be a feat of engineering. They're trying to create a site for a specific niche, seemingly targetting 25 to 45 year old design professionals. This is a bit like asking why are there so many vBulletin forums out there.
That's not really a startup as much as a 'user' -- they use http://www.pligg.com to power the site.
"Fail Fast, Fail Often" is really an indication that we need a Web Science
Why do all that experimentation yourself? Shouldn't it be done by web scientists once and for all? You could then use the results of their research as guidelines to determine the sort of app to build as well as its features/UI.

Also see:

http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/ShneidermanCACM6-2007.pdf

http://weblog.fortnow.com/2007/08/impact-of-facebook-platfor...

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=2205007948&topic=1...
success is not a science
Not completely, but partially it could be.
Describe your ideas using concrete terms
An example of how using an established schema to describe your concept can go a long way in helping people to understand it.
Matt, do you know where the bad poker players in Somerville hang around? I, uh, need to raise some angel money, and Seabrook is a schlep.
The biggest issue is something new. People aren't able to imagine the new big idea until they see it. When they see it, then they want it, but before that they had no idea they would want it. Case in point: the Iphone. Scientists are not the answer.
Security is boring. If there's one thing that big companies do right, it is boring.
You already rely on scientists in the implementation. So why not make use of scientific results in the specification as well?

Sure, the major idea can be new, but the way it is presented can make use of scientific results to increase the probability of success.
If I'm trying to reach a big goal, like "run a marathon" or "bench-press my weight" or "launch my site", the way to do it is to break it up into bite-size chunks with discrete milestones.

It'd be cool to offer some "goal templates" (e.g. "how to train for a marathon"), and allow folks to make and share their own templates. Match up folks with similar long-term goals to form a support network. You could even use that to jump-start the community... market it to a group of people (e.g. marathoners) who are already working towards some big goal.

Plus, this could be the basis of a better encouragement system. If every day's goal is the same ("run"), I don't have any particular reason to cheer you on the 12th day any more than the 9th day. But if you reached a specific milestone on the 12th day I'd give you props.
How would your scientific proposal work in the Iphone example?
Student cracks Government's $84m porn filter
and I think either one is a valid question. what I meant was I wish there was at least some differentiation between stuff not just simple rehashing for different audiences, oh well.
"I think Y Combinator should always do a Boston demo day first, even during the winter session, just to give people the practice."

Pretty hilarious. Or sad.
Scientists Induce Out-of-Body Sensation Using Virtual Reality Goggles
Wow, this introduces a whole new platform.
this is about as off-topic as you can get around here.
That's one way to do it. You could also set Tools/options/main/startup/When-firefox-starts
Twitter is the next distraction.
http://www.mizpee.com/ might gain a sizable audience among women.
I didn't claim YouTube's success was due to any technical features like supporting seeking. I agree a large part of why they were so successful was because of the copyrighted content. They took a risk that Google wouldn't. That proves my point exactly. Startups do many things that big companies can't or won't do. Sometimes that takes the form of working in a gray area of the law.
I think there is new stuff; like you, I don't know why this one was submitted since it's just a pligg script.
Any recommendations for mobile administration?
What can you recommend in the way of solutions for mobile administration, both hardware (i.e. phone), network (bandwidth) and software? I'm running sbcl on Linux servers with virtualmin pro and use Emacs and slime from my Laptop.

I'm thinking of restarting threads and other repl commands and shell interaction.
Ugh, downvoted by mistake when I meant to upvote. Perhaps someone else can upvote to compensate? (And I really wish we could change our vote...it's pretty easy to slip...)
Many of us already do. That's why it's useful to keep up with recent results in psychology/advertising/marketing.

Problem is, one of those results is that consumers often decide whether to use a product based on an initial "gut feeling". That gut feeling is the combination of many factors, most of which are below the level of conscious perception. So science is effectively telling us that science cannot provide these answers...
You mean that YOU think it is off topic. Fortunately, you don't get to decide what is and isn't allowed around here. If you find a post that you think doesn't belong, don't complain about it. Submit something you like or participate in a discussion somewhere else. Try and add some value somewhere.
I didnt submit it as a startup, more as a resource for learning about design