skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't find "walls of text" at all forbidding, as long as the line width isn't too long. I also find Joel's argument on this point a bit dubious:

When was the last time you noticed a popular magazine
or newspaper with entire pages of text?

True, but books do it all the time---as does Joel's essay, except for the gratuitous pull quote in the very section under discussion.
Well if you want to check if somebody is putting in the hours, you could manage it all with Subversion and commit scripts.
Then you just check commit time and frecuency ^^

For quality code you need (to be) a good developer to know that.
That's disappointing. I had thought that Google finally invented Magic. Oh well, maybe next year...
But a lot of the other words make it entertaining. Cutting it down to a few power-point slides full of bullets would be a lot more concise, but also boring (and therefore less effective).
Yeah, random curiosity is definitely a good thing, or at least some amount of it is (like spending 20% of your time on completely random things). But during the other 80% of the time, we just need to move forward without getting blocked by unimportant details.
We totally agree -- OpenID integration is in the works.
Great feedback. You can view a list of all the questions you've answers under accounts activity you're following. We'll look into simplifying that navigation.
re find faster and cheaper ways of testing them: i test using myself, my friends and my family. If i don't use what i've implemented it may not be a good idea.
Brian,
That's troubling -- we haven't seen that problem before.

If you email me at andrew /at/ fluther.com with the discussion I can see what went wrong.

Sorry you had trouble with the site.
I'll have to do that then. What is an interstitial?
Your two points make intuitive sense. Rather than using your next posts to defend them, just come up with more of those. :)
I think this could also be stated as:

If no one is doing what you're doing, it's probably not because no one thought of it before. There are two reasons an idea might never have been developed into a product before:

1.) Seems too hard
2.) Seems unwanted

Underlying these perceptions might well be the reality that the idea is too hard, unwanted, or both, but the perception is what matters.

So, if you're doing something new, most people will think it's either too hard, unwanted, or both. (Otherwise, lots of people would be doing it.) They might be right, but their opinions are not meaningful data points.

If you want to innovate, don't waste your time arguing.
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit
That's a good strategy. Even if the idea were good, if you and the people around you aren't excited about it, then it will be difficult to execute well.
Lisp has no syntax. :)
I dunno - what if your friends and family are laggards on the technology curve? My sister is probably the last person under 25 without a Facebook account. My parents still don't have cable TV, let alone IPods and videophones. They barely know how to turn on a computer. When I tell them what I'm doing, they say "Who has time to play games on the computer, let alone create them?"

If it weren't for my cofounder's constant assurances that yes, people want this (well, and that his girlfriend's roommates tried to sign up for our site even though we're not open yet), I probably would've given up a while ago. Which I guess underscores the importance of having a cofounder from a different background as yourself. It's easy to get stuck in a narrow perspective if the people you're close to all share it.
Creativity tied to mental illness

http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/10.23/01-creativity.html
Venture Capital industry at risk: it&#8217;s getting serious
Yes, I should have said "you OR the people around you". Someone needs to be excited, but they certainly aren't all going to be (most will think it's a bad idea). This is also a good reason to spend more time with the "right" people (people who get excited about new ideas instead of shooting them down).
Yahoo! Go 2.0 Released
steve jobs has failed massively before and it never stopped him. when john carmack's Daikatana failed, he had over 20 years of experience in the game industry -- people like them don't stop because one of the many, many things they've worked on in their long careers don't pan out precisely they way they would have liked. thank god for people like that.

i'm certainly going to wait at least a few months to get an iphone, though.

also, i'm skeptical of people who put raw ascii characters like "~ ~ ~" instead of using an HR element. this is HTML, people, use what's available. scoble does it too and i always mentally discount punditry bullshit from people who don't understand the medium they make predictions about.
yes, finding compatible people with compatible interests to start the project rolling can be the biggest a challenge
I'm curious about what a loop-hole might look like. I am not sure of what I'm asking however I'm putting it out there. Could a VC investment somehow become more like accumulated loss toward operations cost, therefore enabling them to write it off and receive a refund??? Way over my head, but am interested in the spin.
He doesn't break any of the rules too badly, I don't think. He isn't using large words, or convoluted sentences. He's just saying things perhaps you don't find interesting.
I minored in Tech Writing for my CS major, despite my counselor asserting (before he knew my plans) that such a combination would not make sense.
That's excellent, thanks very much. I'm also reminded of

Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. -- Blaise Pascal, Lettres provinciales, letter 16, 1657. (I am sorry for the length of my letter, but I had not the time to write a short one.)

Paul, I agree it needs to attract, entertain, and hold the reader but feel the verbosity is laziness in editing rather than style.
All the writing style and organization in the world is only to get people to read something. If he's gotten you to read it, and you will continue to read what he writes next, he doesn't need to work on all that stuff anymore.

Organization isn't to make the reader's life easier. Making sense of what one reads is largely an introspective activity. No matter how well-organized it is, you the reader have to regurgitate into a form suitable for yourself before you can digest it. This is called active reading.
if you're always fucking swearing, for example, you can't use swearing to express anyfuckingthing.

I worked with a guy who used "fuck", and assorted variations, the way people use "um", "like", and "you know".

I had a hard time following what he was saying because I was so distracted with wondering how many times he would use that word.
Hi nivi, this sounds interesting, but can you elaborate a bit on your development structure? A single-developer place triggers some alarm bells in my head: http://eddiesguy.blogspot.com/2007/06/creating-my-own-personal-hell.html

I am in the market, but I've spent the last seven years working alone on my dissertation, and I really want to be part of a 2-3 man team this time around. I think that is the ideal structure.
It's no surprise; creativity is "think different." It's seeing what cognitive fixation prevents us to see.
great interview, guys. i love the "make delicious software" quote... haha. keep kicking ass.
that was enough of a kick in the ass to sign up for coverage (after having intended to for a while but never really getting around to it), thanks for the post :P

btw, other summer yc founders in cambridge (or other massachusetts residents): go to http://mahealthconnector.org ; the lowest plan costs like $119/mo and it takes like 5 mins to enroll and it's all online.
Completely agree. Yegge writes a lot, but it's well-paced if you have the time to read it. When he makes a new post I generally set aside some time to read it in its entirety in one sitting.
I've an idea that (I believe) would be useful to people in their day to day real-life. If I get to the stage where I need to attract those people as users I was thinking of targetting a small number of them that are geographically local; I know where they hang out. Just with old fashioned posters on notice boards, that kind of thing. They'll be a small set of guinea pigs to experiment on. As luck would have it, they're typically in touch with others of their kind so if they like the site I think they'll voluntarily tells others.

My poorly made point is that old fashioned advertising may be an initial way to attract users if they're targetable.
I guess extremely fine execution of a "bad idea" can make its use so painless as to raise its usefulness into a good idea?
Hi Kartik,

The ideal person will build the first version of the product. Front-end and back-end.

I would collaborate with him/her to define what the product looks like but I won't write any code. I'm strong technically (MIT EECS Ph.D. dropout) but I am not a developer.

I can do copy writing of course. And work through any admin panels we set up.
It felt getting me tired reading...
until iPhone becomes an every-day-use phone, Nokia and other big players will have already use multitouch screens in their proven brands...iPhone will fail for the same reasons Apple failed to compete with Windows....Apple should take some history lessons...
What's the best health insurance company for catastrophic coverage?  Kaiser?  BC/Tonik?  State Farm?
Paul Buchheit just linked to Tonik from his blog. Anyone have any experience with BC/Tonik? Are they any good? How about Kaiser? Someone mentioned State Farm as well. Kaiser's cheapest CA plan is $109 a month for a $1500 deductible, Tonik is around $89 for a $3k deductible. Is there a good link to reviews of these plans?
1) He probably couldn't use HTML
2) HR sucks unless you can style it.
3) You don't need to understand HTML to be a good pundit
4) The tildes look nicer anyway.
5) The...

Actually screw it, I'm just going to downvote you.
you better believe it : )

scaling the first week was hell. now i'm doing more features.
thanks for the mention
That's a good formulation as well. I wrote it the way I did in part because I'm also trying to defend "bad" ideas.
Sounds like the beginnings of a startup idea :)

I'd say my experience with HI is that it's typically best to go for customer service, as well as coverage. When I had Kaiser, it was excellent. Blue Cross/Blue Shield, typically, has excellent coverage as well. Don't know about Tonik.
"That's very bad news for the VC industry, as high taxes will probably result in a decrease in interest in this kind of investments."

From my understanding of the law, it won't do this. VCs get paid a cut of the profits of the fund, which is (mostly) other people's money. I don't see why those should be classified as capital gains when they're not making money as a result of their own investment. They're making money as a result of doing their jobs, and should be taxed on it just like everyone else. This won't affect how much investors put into VC funds, since that will still be classified as capital gains. It will just make working for a VC firm a little less profitable.

I don't see why VCs should be exempt from the rules everyone else has to play by.
Yes true. You won't waste the time in acquisition talks if you're not interested in selling. Yes, everyone has a price, exactly, which is why the whole notion of pretending you don't want to be bought is meaningless BS. You just don't want to be bought cheaply.

If you're in talks, you're TRYING to sell, the only question is the price.
So like a monthly $10-$15 value... Hmm.
I would wish them good luck if they wanted to take it! The hard part is the execution.

Everyone has great ideas that they can't implement. That's why I learned to program in the first place.
We did 5mil + option pool. If you are doing SV model, vanilla flavor is the only acceptable flavor for these numbers and the rest of corporate structure. People around here have a good idea of what percentage of the company say 10,000 of the company usually represent and if you are way off it's a bad sign.
Sergey Brin: 'I want to convey to you a sense of caution and responsibility as you go about using these tools'
Hhhhmmm, I've read some of your site so far.

I see that paying naive college students in Ramon noodles to work in overdrive to create a startup is indeed pure genius. The startup at Y-Combinatorics has a much better chance of being popular regardless of merit, because, face facts, our mass media isn't particularly clever or creative but more a bullhorn for what they are told is trendy and clever. Congratulations.

That said, I say to everyone out there, empathy is the well from which creativity springs.

The old have suffered and have had their minds sharply honed to recognize problems. It's called being cranky. That gives the old the unique perspectives needed to identify solutions. However, the old have wrinkles, yuck, and are not marketable by the mass media as genius wunderkinder.

With that in mind and noting that telecomuting is increasingly relevant it's clear Y-Combinatorics is not about founding companies with relevant solutions and worth while products. It is about marketing (man we Americans have mass media that are ignorant a@@ clowns). It is about manipulating the ignorant mass media into egging on the Goggles of the world to ape the thought process expounded in the media and snatch up such trendy start-ups as StuffedUp and so on.

So yeah, any clown with a startup idea would be a fool not to take advantage of such a flatulent environment. If they don't like your makeup, wipe it off and paint a new face. Go for it!
I'm not quite sure how to express this, but it seems like the smartest people tend to work on the most seemingly trivial problems. You'd think that geniuses would gravitate toward really hard problems, but a lot of the Nobel/MacArthur winners are more like Karl Von Frisch who discovered bees doing the waggle dance. Or Darwin who spent eight years studying barnacles.
Developing *mobile* applications; which platform has fewer serious problems - J2ME or Flash?
Request for Steve Yegge to shave and cut his hair (man you look like the average pot smoker)
Andrew Chen: Web 2.0 + Virtual goods - what every entrepreneur should know
Amazon EC2 & S3 disaster planning (what does your disaster recovery plan look like?)
Localizing Print on Demand (description of 'POD' machines to produce printed information)
A&$hole driven development (ADD, CDD, CYAE, ... a more honest list of dev frameworks)
How to innovate on time (how do you guide failure towards innovation?)
Efficiency vs. Creativity (polarizing efficiency & creativity as mutually exclusive is shallow)
Funny, I was just thinking about this the other day.

I don't think most of its users could afford to move things in-house, assuming Amazon would even announce in advance that S3 was shutting down.
I believe this validates your point. From the pmarca(Mark Andreesen) blog post "The truth about VC, part 2"

How to Make a Venture Capitalists Head Explode:

Point out to her that her compensation from carried interest should be taxed as ordinary income, not capital gains, since she's receiving a fee for service and it's not her capital at risk.
Bill Gates' Legacy: Tech Titan Or Tyrant?
Down To Business: 2.0 Mania: The Line Between Pragmatist And Naysayer
12 Weeks to Startup
10 Traits of a Successful Woman
It is just being nitpicky instead of engaging the substance of an argument, but if you ever go to a blog and see that the writer doesn't know how to use the blockquote tag, don't you just think, "This guy doesn't know what s/he's doing…"?
j2me is much more widespread. You could even give Hecl a whirl to put together a prototype ( http://www.hecl.org - just remember to get it from subversion rather than the SF download).
Femtocell race
2 points:

- When anyone writes a story about something failing, they need to define what they mean by fail. Do they mean loose Apple millions, or not sell a zillion a week? I suppose the fairest means of judging failure here, is to use Apple's target of 10m in the first 12 months. Which will of course require the pundits wait 12 months before declaring failure...

- In The Design (nee Philosophy) of Everyday Things, Donald Norman cites a designer who says it takes about six iterations of a new technology before it reaches a state where it has had most of the issues worked out and is ready for public acceptance, but because of the initial failures, most new technologies never get used more than once or twice (I'm unable to find the quote in the book currently, but can look again if anyone is interested).
To put this in context, I don't think touchscreens have done their 6 iterations yet, and the current failures are making pursuing this difficult. Some things are the way of the future, but they require someone to risk failure in order to get them there.
Facebook in 40 years
A couple I didn't see was having good mentor(s) & a technical social network. Those two things can make or break any person, successful or not.

Mentors allow you to develop without making basic mistakes & learning hard fought lessons that are not taught. Mentors also help with making informal connections. A technical social network allows you to tap into a diverse group informally when you are in trouble or when you need a sounding board for ideas or thoughts.
Disgusting display of hypocrisy
We basically have a funny upsell for tell a friend on the site when you log in after a few days. It's similar to mozilla's "spread firefox" message on the moz FF homepage.
Show you how many copies of a file exists, and how quickly a file uploaded to them becomes redundant.

If I could search YC I'd point back to an earlier discussion we had on S3. One of the points that came up was how do you know when your uploaded file is "safe", i.e. not when the upload has finished but when all N copies exist so you can go back to your user and say "fear not". A simple fetch of it is insufficient; S3 is selling itself on its redundancy so it needs to prove it. Anyone know of a way to do this?
Thinking about it some...

What made that such a good perk was that it was something that worked pretty well "collectively". Everyone, from the boss on down, got their 15 minutes, so it was spread out evenly. Fatty/sugary glop is of more (short term) "benefit" to those who consume more of it. In that case I'd rather just keep the money to spend as I want. Also, a massage isn't something I probably would have gone to the trouble of signing up for, at least for 15 minutes, so that made it sort of a pleasant 'extra'. Also, the rates were probably a bit lower, because the woman had a whole day's worth of work.
Simile (mit dhtml-based ajax widget for visualizing time-based events)
Are any of these things really that different for women than for men?
That article oscillates between being tautological and stereotyping. How the hell did it make it on this forum?
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
Google Developer Day 2007-US Keynote (Sergey Brin last 10 minute)
Google was a feature on Yahoo's site. They would have even sold their "feature company" were anyone willing to pay enough for the value they knew they had created.
Five Things That Could Kill Facebook
No company the size of Yahoo or Google uses just one language for everything. Google has Guido on their payroll and Yahoo has Lerdorf on theirs. It's a cultural choice more than anything.
Male guilt?
Definitely not a fan of Kaiser. They're really restrictive and extremely good at avoiding proper treatment from what I've seen. With most normal HMOs you can at least see a variety of somewhat-independent doctors and some quite-independent specialists. It's easy to move around. I hate to recommend any insurance company but Blue Shield of California did okay for me.
I agree it's laziness but I think it's a win for us. If he had to spend weeks instead of hours writing these posts he might not publish anything at all. Those of us willing to wade through his stuff get lots of value for a reasonable cost.

My understanding is that PG spends weeks writing and editing his longer essays. The result is obviously much more solid and digestible, but I'd definitely trade some of that solidity for more quantity. That might be key the difference between a blogger and an essayist.
I would say that if it's not a .com then it better be unique: eg. NOT .net or .org.
Well, I've got to admit that I don't see the fundamental difference. One involves death, but death is also quantifiable.

"Your strategy should be to seek upside while limiting downside.": But it's all a matter of degree! Taking insurance would be a dumb idea if it costed 5000$/month, wouldn't it?

Plus, there is all this business about being risk-averse or not, for which there is no rational answer. People who stick to their safe jobs are risk-averse. It makes absolute sense for them to get insurance, as long as its expectation value is not too negative. People who do startups, however, are less risk-averse. They accept a game in which the EV is higher, but variance is also high. Not taking insurance is a very similar game: higher EV (presumably; it depends on the value and probability of death), higher variance.

Loto and russian roulette both have low EV and high variance. They both suck.

So would you rather have a 100% chance of an exciting life, or a 99% chance of a slightly more exciting life + 1% chance of a really bad one?

I believe there is no single answer to the question, even if you quantify everything. It depends on how risk-averse you are.

But maybe I'm just blinded by mathematics. If so, I'd appreciate a correction.
You seem to have a fixed idea, and you are not listening to feeback. You have a concept, now learn from your users.

Make it that answering a question is possible anonymously with a captcha. To ask a new question, you need to register. You'll hold on to more users this way.

Don't be obstinate. You don't know best. Everyone here is saying the same thing about anonymous answers, do listen.
you're better off using wap/ mobile XHMTL
The parallel with scientific research strikes me. To find gems one has to look into spaces left in the shadow by people.

I often was surprised to see that better algorithm where obtained by counter intuitive approaches (i.e. BM string search algorithm, radix sort,...). This is now a heuristic I use in my activity.

In addition to looking into ideas that are often discarded, Paul also reminds us that the testing cost (time, complexity, finance) should be minimal. The rational is not to be economical, but to maximize the number of tests and experiences one can do with the limite resource we have.

This is the Murphy's law in the positive sense as I explained here [http://tinyurl.com/25tjkv].

Looking into the bad idea space increases the probability to find a good one and picking cheap ideas to test allows to increase n. This maximizes the probability of success.