skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You got enough good-wishers/friends here but I'll be an asshole.

If you want to lead some company, you don't rant. You simply can't. I recall a submarine captain from some movie who, when asked "what if you don't know the answer," he replies, "you can't not know the answer."

You cannot falter. Even in the worst of worst circumstances, when you feel like the whole world is against you and you face your demise, you cannot show weakness of character. Soldiers ask the commander when shit happens, but the commander has nobody to ask. If you're a commander, loneliness is not of the least of worries you will face. Depending on someone else for emotional support, in my opinion, is a luxury with great risk.

You're a guy paddling a boat in the middle of the pacific. When you hit a storm, you don't look for people who tell you, "I'm waiting on the island of success for you." You look for people who can sit in the damn boat and actually row with you, or throw you a rope or even fix you a motor. At times of stress, "sweet"ness means absolutely nothing.

If you are a leader, you share your personal pains only with those who would risk their lives for you. And you only know they would, when they do.

This is merely a turning point in life. The sooner you get out of it, the stronger you'll be. So get out now, and make the next decision.

I spent too much time writing this... hope it actually benefits you.
Luckily we have Gabor on our team, and he is the kind of rock-star player who is in the top 1% of hackers and top 5% of designers. We use a great design firm to fill the gaps (www.vestaldesign.com). We use the design firm when we can't afford spending internal Xobni team member resources on design or when we need an outside perspective on our UI.

In my experience, it is incredibly valuable to use a designer with some coding experience. They appreciate the limitations of the medium.
> Good design is far more expensive than you think. And I believe you've severely underestimated it's value in a startup

Good design doesn't cost anything if you do it yourself. Google did it for virtually nothing and beat Yahoo's horde of professionals. They're hardly alone. Maybe it's hard to tell from the way I talk about it but I think design is immensely valuable. I just think it's not some sacred craft that only people called designers can do.
They're going to give your ideas to your closest competitors. Haven't you heard of Competitor Day?

/old

But seriously, ideas are totally worthless. I thought my totally awesome idea for a productivity site was worth a billion dollars too. And I built it and released it, and you know what? Nobody cared, and rightly so, because it was poorly executed. Now I'm playing catch-up with the design by making things cleaner, streamlined, and simple. That is what matters, not whatever your idea is. Though it's not until you've been steamrolled by brett and his clickable calendar that one can really understand that, maybe. :)
Design means different things to different people. If you mean that in terms of workflow/ease of use, that's going to be largely a function of the team and feedback from customers.

As far as the graphic design that can easily and cheaply be outsourced, though even then you'd ideally want one or more founders with a good aesthetic sense to work with them.
Not to compare your recent few days to a study in probability, but these are all independent events that didn't go the way you wanted...

Good luck!
Web 2.0 trends; Vint Cerf and the &#8220;IPod Moment&#8221;
Yes, the process is very similar. My degree is in audio, my early college work in music. I don't have a computer science degree. I've known a lot of musician-turned-hackers and hacker-turned-musicians.

But I think you're missing a subtle aspect of developing arbitrarily good applications: You probably can't develop a truly great application one block at a time. Sure, you can add all the features of a truly great application one block at a time. But the devil is in the details (just like in music, art, etc.), and sometimes missing one spark of inspiration can make all the difference.

Google is great software. Microsoft Live search is a cheap knockoff with more features and flashier design and less of whatever it is that makes Google "great".

The iPod is great software. Zune is a cheap knockoff with more features and less of whatever it is that makes the iPod "great".

And those two "knockoff" examples were made after the original--they should have been able to copy the "great" aspect and one-up it, by throwing money at it. But somehow they failed. That's the subtle distinction between great software/art/music and mediocrity.

The Beatles made great music. Paul Revere and the Raiders made cheap knockoff songs with less of whatever it is that makes the Beatles "great".

jraines post sums up quite a bit of the process similarities, so I won't go into it.

Music is less objective than software--a bug is a bug, but a blue note might be on purpose and it might be the key to the song. So, it's not precisely the same. Knowing software works or doesn't might be easier than knowing if a melody is worth anything.
I forget who said this (Paul Buchheit, maybe?), but it made a lot of sense to me: don't listen to your users, watch your users. Figure out what they're trying to accomplish -- via usability testing and analytics -- and use that to inform product development.

Feature blight is a separate issue. It's good to try out lots of stuff, but you can't just vomit out feature after feature -- you have to iterate. After you release a feature, watch how people use it. If they're not using it, tweak it or axe it. Features need to earn a permanent place in your app.
Scott Rosenberg: Web 2.0's five-year development cycle
We have Mark, he's by far in the top third of something. He's also figuring out this CSS thing.
Andrew Chen: Are people like lab rats? Using reward schedules to drive engagement
Norman Borlaug: the greatest person to ever live?
"Borlaug is often credited with saving over a billion people from starvation."

Penn and Teller declared him the greatest human being to ever live and you really can't argue with that.

What have you done today? :)
Facebook's platform to reward good, punish bad applications
There is a lot of tools to apt-get after deploying a new Debian machine, but you'll mostly add them while you go. For a laptop, you'll want to install some networking tools before you need them: resolvconf, dnsmasq, wpasupplicant, bluez-utils, irda-utils, mtr, iptraf, tcpdump

Also some offline tools unless you keep a package archive with you on the go: dict, what have you
Robert Frank talks about economics at Google
Facebook Takes Further Steps To Curb User Abuse; Change In How Applications Are Measured
Perhaps you should start with the question "How valuable is good design to the team" and work backwards. :-)
Sure. If you can do it. Most people can't (not just hackers), and the people least able to recognize horrible design are generally the people who don't recognize their own failings in that area. Simplicity is the solution, as you've noted...but I've seen what passes for simplicity to some people. It can be very very bad.

It's not sacred, but if you don't spend some time studying good design (and learning what makes for bad design), you'll probably shoot yourself in the foot without knowing it. Even if you do, you still might shoot yourself in the foot.
Global wheat prices reach record level
According to the CIA factbook, China is a communist state.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
Googles OS Confirmed : Goobuntu A
5000 Web Apps in 333 seconds: simplespark
Simple Spark maintains a list of web apps which recently surpassed 5000 entries. To celebrate, the crammed the logos of the 5000+ web applications they index into a 333-second youtube video (15 logos/second!). How many do you recognize?

"Just a few months ago, we launched Simple Spark with 1000 web applications. Today, we're proud to announce that the Simple Spark Catalog has surpassed 5000 fully searchable, summarized, and categorized web apps that are ready for discovery."
Great story.

The fact that Norman was a great-grandchild of Norwegian immigrants to the US makes one wonder how many talented people are going to waste given the current almost epidemic prevalence of xenophobia in the US and in Europe.

It is remarkable that someone who went on to become an accomplished scientist failed his University entrance exam!
I guess I am the 100% opposite of that person :-/
Max Levchin at 2006 UIUC Talk "You should start a company right now" (video)
If I could create a good piece of music (recording), I would be happy. Being able to perform it would be a plus, but not so important.

I tend to think more in terms of emotions I would like to express, but maybe that is insufficient.
From your argument follows that any true statement about something is descriptive. Under that acception, my post is self contradicting.

I was relying on a less inclusive meaning of the word: to describe as in to relate intrinsic properties of something. Yes, 'intrinsic' itself is a sloppy concept defined mostly by convention, but that's true for most of our language. I'll leave it at that, apologize for my sloppy language, and appeal to common sense.

My point is that the "rejected by YC" tag doesn't add much information, certainly not enough to merit being in the title. Its main effect is attention grabbing. Those priorities are inappropriate enough for me, and I support the banning of this kind of stuff.
Can I still call them "swatch thingies" ?
Sorry to hear about the girlfriend. We all know how much that stuff hurts...

Everything else doesn't seem so bad.
PG has answered this - no.
First impression is important. You got an ordinary grey building on one side, and Taj Mahal on the other. Which one would you rather walk into?

Next round of Y Combinator starts in January, plenty of time to learn the mechanics of designing. Your already got a head start from the experience of personal preferences.
"... Who is YC user PortLAN? -- He is hilarious ..."

ought to be able to track him via hackrtrackr ( http://hackrtrackr.com ) but I can't seem to find the tag. Swear there was a @portLAN in the UK. Might send a note to @brad to do name lookups instead of just by area.
"... You got enough good-wishers/friends here but I'll be an asshole. ..."

what I think whacked means is he's not going to "sugar coat things" but tell it to you straight. Warts and all :)

"... And today, the one person I called my best friend let me down. I called him and say I needed his help. O boy. "Hang on" he told me, "You will do fine". O boy. ..."

And like whacked I'll add some words. Read this article. "Advice to Young Men from an Old Man". I know you can't teach wisdom but I offer the link anyway. It starts off ... "1. Don't pick on the weak. It's immoral. Don't antagonize the strong without cause, its stupid" ~ http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/279126743.html
Since most startups build server applications, this is a lot easier than it was in the days of shrink-wrap.
Nothing startling. 19 worked fine, so we may accept more, if we get enough good applications.
Hi there,

Sorry to hear about all this you're going through at the moment. We've all had things like this happen at some point but you've really had it all piled on at once.

Can I say congrats on quitting your job? I had a job that burnt me out, got me down and probably caused my last breakup - I wish I'd had the courage to leave instead of hanging around and not doing anything about it. Good luck in finding a new job - the difference will be like night and day when you find somewhere good to work. I promise you. Maybe you can then afford a better car, phone and maybe a new GF ... better than the previous models?

Also move on from your ex. As in: don't try and contact her again or read her blog/facebook or (try not to) leave drunken voicemail messages. She obviously didn't give a crap and you'll only just drag out making it harder to get back to normal. Any sort of "let's just be friends" is just to make herself feel better about doing this to you.

As many posts here say - go out, don't sit about at home feeling sorry for yourself. Not that you're not entitled to, but it just won't do you any good.

Take care of yourself and sort out what needs sorting out. Don't forget to eat ... and breath.

I wish you the best of luck and hope things work out for you. I bet they will.
Is reddit down?
New hydrogen generating technology "competitive with gasoline"
Render text between asterisks as emphasized only if there is no space between the asterisk and the contained text, and only for pairs of asterisks. If there is any space, or for unmatched asterisks, assume the author really meant to place a star there. This is to prevent things like the following

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47137

where the author meant to use the asterisk as a multiplication symbol.
Big increase in "behaviorally targeted" Internet ads
How Three Swedish Geeks Became Hollywood's Number One Enemy
HackrTrackr is almost done. I rewrote quite a bit of it in order to speed up load times, and the area based forums I'm hoping to complete in the next couple days.
It is for me - was waiting for someone to post this :-)
Likewise here. Hickups with the rewrite?
Digg Gets A Major Makeover
Start-up tests odds on lotto tickets
A team of four current and former Duke students created a start-up company this summer and their website SeeMeWin.com launched July 14.

The project examines how lotteries really work. The company gives people money from advertising revenue to buy lottery tickets and requires scratchers to send in live footage of their shows, as they scratch the cards.
down for 1hr for me
Uhm... ever heard of Multibyte?!

Heck, our whole RoR based app is localized in 7 different languages.
Are you saying it uses a different profile?
Been down for almost an hour that I know of. This site is my next-stop on the morning list... so I got here a 'tad' earlier. ;)
Web Innovators Group Event - Sept 10
What Really Buys Happiness?
The Art of Bootstrapping
Someone once told me that the probability of an entrepreneur getting venture capital is the same as getting struck by lightning while standing at the bottom of a swimming pool on a sunny day. This may be too optimistic.
It's a little older but has some good points.
slightly off topic, but I think a beat or melody CAN be generally interchangeable if it's done right and with interchangeability in mind. See here: http://micropledge.com/projects/music-mash
I used to use the evening walks with our dog to solve programming problems. We live in a very, very quiet suburb with large properties, there is only local trafic and nothing else. So it was possible for me to visualise the solution to a problem into the dark in front of me (like an internal blackboard). Many times I came home after about an hour with a happy dog and a way to solve the problem or at least a great way to it. I just had to make some short note of it to pick it up next morning, the note releasing all saved information in my brain. Worked a treat for me.
You can get the full vid (134mb) in high res here:
http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/conference/2006/webcast.php

Others: Kwabena Boahen, Adrian Bowyer, Burnie Burns (degraded audio, starts 5 minutes in), Harold Cohen, Robert Cringely, Chris DiBona, Jawed Karim, Max Levchin, Chip Mayse, Jim Miller, Yale Patt, Joel Spolsky and Michael Swift.
I would say that it wasn't Google's design that beat Yahoo, it was the narrow focus on search. There is very little information to design on the Google home page and the expected interaction is incredibly simplistic, so designing the UI well should have been easy.

The problem is that most people see Google as a great example of engineers doing design, but there was really /nothing/ to design. If an engineer managed to screw a single search field up, then that's just bad. (And, I have known engineers who've screwed up simple search fields.)

My recommended guideline here: as information increases in density and interaction increases in complexity, the need to have someone focus on design increases. Now, is this person a bona fide designer or one of the engineers that has some design skill? That's for the individual startup to determine.
Is it confirmed that Google made the app? Like a Google Blog post or something?
If anyone on a founding team is ever willing to do only one thing, then they're probably not a good founding member period. This goes for hackers, designers, business folks, and lion trainers. (Well, the lion trainers might be the exception here. I learned this lesson the hard way--it's hard typing with my right arm missing. On the plus side, we didn't have to feed Betsie for a month!)
The Pmarca Guide to Startups, Part 8: Hiring, managing, promoting, and firing executives
Becareful hackers, I don't think we want to see pictures on this site.
Then we need to apply astronomical numbers to neural configurations. Using the mass in a galaxy to make a computer where the logic is on the atomic scale...

10^9 stars, each with 10^57 atoms. The logic of the post is that a group of 10^7 nuerons can have a thought, and there are 10^70000000000 ways to group them. But there are 10^59 groups of this size, each operating independently, which implies 10^(7*10^69) states in a galactic brain#, but let's call it 10^10^70 to be neat and account for dark matter in the galaxy :).

There are around 125 billions galaxies in the universe. Also, we might one day find a way to create matter.

# if my logic is right, that is. I might need a bigger brain.
Down for me for about one hour and a half. Now it is up.
it's up :)
If by nothing you mean he wants the government to have nothing to do with our business, then yes you are right.

Anyways, this article is stupid, he catches some girl off guard and asks a dumb question. And he tries to link it with "having a sales pitch down". I wasted my time looking at the site, I wasted my time replying to a troll, and now I just wasted time adding my two cents on this article.
Thank you everyone for your support. After posting this and answering 2 comments, I turned off my laptop and went to sleep. I didn't do sleep right away. My girlfriend told me everything ( well according to her ) and what was in her heart. I didn't really like what I heard, but at least I felt free. Now that I think about it, maybe it isn't that bad a little bit. When feelings are involved everything doubles up. We are now on the same page and it is better to get out now than latter. The car, the phone I will replace. It is ok. I start realizing that maybe not being connected is not that bad. I think I am not going to replace the push-email enabled phone for a while and enjoy my new found freedom.
The job, I don't care. I am happy now. I can concentrate on my startup and I have been doing some consulting ( self proclaim consultant )work, but I was scared to go at it full time. Now, that is what I am doing and at least I enjoy it.

Thank you guys. Maybe I will never see all of you in real life, but you have made me feel better. Everyone needs someone. And sometimes that someone, or "those people" are the ones you argue with online, the ones who don't have a name but a username, the ones who take a moment away from their precious time and support you through hard times.
Thank you all.
This was discussed a bit here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33568
FYI: http://blog.reddit.com/2007/08/reddit-downtime.html
Weighted Slope One in Haskell: collaborative filtering in 29 lines of code
I wouldn't qualify them as knowing the basics. I think they're musical geniuses.
Heat/power issues at the datacenter make reddit go down.
Current design fad in our world are gradients, big fonts, and reflections. Hers is pretty refreshing, but in order to achieve those effects, she used a lot of unorthodox methods.

I don't know if it's some sort of layout software that's doing it, or she did it by hand, but it's a lot of absolute positioning.

I still think very page-like and being semantically correct when it comes to my layouts. Her methods gives me something else to think about. In addition, if her page source is any indication, CSS and HTML is nowhere near the expressibility that is required for complicated layouts. If it were, her source would be more semantically valid, and she wouldn't be using divs for the buildings and all the little windows in the upper right corner.
Top 100 "Undiscovered" Web Sites
Papervision3D: lovely, for a browser
If a country's carrying capacity is 10, and the population is 11, then you get starvation. If you raise the carrying capacity to 20, the starvation ends. Until the population hits 21. That is not a sustainable process.

Meanwhile, the ratio of people to non-food natural resources has increased, resulting in pollution and crowding.
That entry is under "Government Type", not under "Economy". The relevant passage from the Economy section is "China's economy during the last quarter century has changed from a centrally planned system that was largely closed to international trade to a more market-oriented economy that has a rapidly growing private sector and is a major player in the global economy."

This may be confusing, because communism is both a political and an economic system. China could best be described as a one-party communist state with a free-market capitalist economy. However, the article is the economy, not the government. These complaints wouldn't be an issue if China was really Communist - the recent uproar has been about a lack of government regulation in product manufacturer, while a truly communist government would manufacturer all the goods itself.
Wow - lets hope they pull it off!
Nope. They gave you smallpox-infested blankets, made you walk thousands of miles to the reservation, and massacred you if you resisted.
CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing
almost epidemic prevalence of xenophobia

Multiculturalism is practically the state religion in the US.
Why Apple Can't Stop iPhone Hackers
It was Jakob Nielsen, but Paul Buchheit says things that apply the same principle.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010805.html
Oh the Irony 
"We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." -- Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, 1998

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
"For me, search and ads are almost the same." -- Google executive Marissa Mayer, 2007.
How do you share YC Winter Program application?
I am in the process of filling the YC 08 winter program application. I have filled the application and I would like my friend (co-founder) to fill some parts and review the application. How do I share the application, do I need to share my user name and password or is there some way to do this?
Thanks in advance and sorry I didn't know where to post this question.
jwz: preventing wrist problems
Don't forget that the Chinese government has a minority stake in many major Chinese companies. This is a kind of partial communism, at least.
"Besides increasing the worldwide food supply, Borlaug has repeatedly stated that taking steps to decrease the rate of population growth will also be necessary to prevent food shortages. In his Nobel Lecture of 1970, Borlaug stated, "Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace of the 'Population Monster'...If it continues to increase at the estimated present rate of two percent a year, the world population will reach 6.5 billion by the year 2000. Currently, with each second, or tick of the clock, about 2.2 additional people are added to the world population. The rhythm of increase will accelerate to 2.7, 3.3, and 4.0 for each tick of the clock by 1980, 1990, and 2000, respectively, unless man becomes more realistic and preoccupied about this impending doom. The tick-tock of the clock will continually grow louder and more menacing each decade. Where will it all end?"[20]"