skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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We've just released our 'News Feed' www.clutterme.com/public
Google mobile usage surges this summer
Philip Greenspun: Improving Undergraduate Computer Science Education
Very good essay.

The only part I don't really agree with is the implicit condemnation of programming done by large companies. Yes, their methods result in mediocre software, but that's often what you want. There's a reason they try to treat programmers as interchangeable cogs, and resist having an entire program in one person's head.

To use the tired "building a house" metaphor - you can get a renowned architect to design the next landmark in a city, or you can get mediocre, interchangeable architects to design a row of townhouses. Both approaches are valid and have their own place, but there's no point asking the famous architect to build townhouses.
Don't forget you can combine the two. This is often done for you already if you use the pool or hot tub at your apartment complex that kids were playing in all day.
I use a heavily modified version of Case Tracker, a group of addon modules for the Drupal CMS. It's similar to other helpdesks (it's actually a fork of the project and project release modules that are used at drupal.org) and it's being extended by a student during this year's Google Summer of Code.

Since Case Tracker runs in Drupal it's just one feature of an entire suite. I have all the features I need, from web-to-email, email-to-web (posting by email or phone), XML-RPC, a full range of access controls, wiki functionality, RSS feeds, etc.
The Executive Coloring Book
http://www.boost.org/libs/smart_ptr/shared_ptr.htm

Granted, it's not garbage collection, but sometimes you have to write C++ and boost makes that manageable. boost::shared_ptr is based on refcounts, so you need to be aware of cycles and use boost::weak_ptr accordingly.
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A poorly laid-out neighborhood of shoddily-built slums? I think that's a rather good analogy for corporate IT.
>the old code was essentially two years of hacks and cludges.
The new version is much cleaner, and the new back-end is much more malleable. The idea is that once we get caught up with ourselves, the actual new stuff will come pretty quickly.
One startup I joined was rejected by YC, and when we got the news the founder bought a car. This made it hard for me to take him seriously (and get paid) and I quit.

This was a while ago and the startup still hasn't launched. I hope he succeeds at some point. The founder's idea is brilliantly disruptive and democratizes a multi-billion dollar industry we all take for granted.
Here are some related posts I made to that:
http://blogs.adventnet.com/svembu/2006/02/23/the-perils-of-c...

And this series may be particularly interesting to Y Combinator hackers. I wonder aloud whether college is really a placebo (note that placebo has real medical value!)
http://blogs.adventnet.com/svembu/2005/11/03/college-educati...

http://blogs.adventnet.com/svembu/2005/11/17/college-educati...
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I think this is actually quite a good idea - better than truemors certainly. I recently had an idea to notify people when new series of their favourite tv shows hit the screens - I know there are usually many promos but for some reason I still tend to miss them. What you are proposing takes the concept beyond just TV shows and I think it could very likely work. I say go for it.
What makes it funny exactly? To use an analogy (a poor one, like all), if this were a medical advice board, and someone had said 'I've got aids and i'm looking for a good retroviral" and the reply was "Chemo! <ducking>"..... I don't find that funny at all... just smug cancer weenies.
> If not, YCombinator picks the winners pretty well.

Impossible to say without knowing what the selectees would've done on their own. A lot of the winners might have opted to stay in college, for example, if they hadn't been picked. Simply being selected is automatically going to influence the result -- having all that support behind you makes it more likely that you'll succeed.

There's a certain amount of being made, not born, so to speak; you might think of it as being a bit like the Spice Girls.

*Cough*
Hmmm... maybe I should name my band, er, startup We Threw Gasoline On The Fire And Now We Have Stumps For Arms And No Eyebrows (a NoFX song) :~).
A cornerstone of the male networks the author describes are put downs, and in my conversations with women who have technical degrees, they often say they couldn't handle the culture not because of the work but because of the constant jockeying for status.
My idea for YC was a very large project... one of the many reasons we were rejected was that I didn't agree with PG during the interview as far as making a smaller subset of the idea. I of course recognize his point as valid but we really didn't have time to talk about it.

We didn't get in, everyone stayed in college, and no one devoted themselves to the project in the way that YC hackers do.
Guess I have to upvote that, since I've been following the story for years and now have a vested interest in the outcome.

>>Complying with the W.T.O. ruling, Professor Jackson said, would require Congress and the Bush administration either to reverse course and permit Americans to place bets online legally with offshore casinos or, equally unlikely, impose an across-the-board ban on all forms of Internet gambling -- including the online purchase of lottery tickets, participation in Web-based pro sports fantasy leagues and off-track wagering on horse racing.<<

The rest could go to hell in a handbasket as far as the government is concerned, but off-track wagering is a massive industry. The lobbying there is just too strong.

Also Americans can place bets legally with off-shore casinos (in most states there is no law against it). It's just illegal for banks to process the payments.
checklists stored in emails, & the backs of credit-card-bill envelopes
I'm not sure that men's willingness to make things that people want really sets them apart from women. Across cultures, women play an important (and often exclusive) role in the economy -- drying fish or tending sheep or what have you.

Women rarely played a role in the macro-economy, true enough; but for much of history, trade within a village was for more valuable than trade between villages or nations. It's misleading to suggest that the present worthlessness of small scale trade implies the past worthlessness of women as economic engines.
I Second that.
Extremely easy to set up and comes with quite reasonable default configuration.
The real gem would be if you could find a way to figure out what they might want to be notified about without them having to specifically request it. For example, say I want to know when 24 is coming to DVD, but I've only used your site once and I don't think to go and add it. Maybe you can use the Facebook API, see that one of my favorite shows is 24, and then any new notifications relating to 24 get directed to me. This is of course just one example.

Just a thought...
Will changing the ticker to JAVA help Sun shake off it's dinosaur persona? hmmmmm
No, w3c just redefined "px" in CSS to be a relative measurement, not necessarily corresponding an actual screen pixel. Problem solved!
10 Business-lunch blunders to avoid
What a bunch of bullshit. This is at best stupid business-book pith, and at worst completely irresponsible advice. The parts about using your personal cash, spending kids college fund, blowing through your retirement account are particularly egregious. The founders of the most successful companies in Silicon Valley sure didn't risk their own money building their empires. If you're starting a (failed) nightclub in Cleveland, maybe it is a different story.
I'm trying to write a novel, and find that all eight points are equally instructive if you replace 'program' with 'story,' 'programming' with 'writing,' and so on. Number 8 is particularly helpful in this context, at least for me.
I had a similar line of thought in a blog post awhile back at http://compoundedthought.blogspot.com/2007/02/people-factor-...

The idea here is that organizations are inherently anti-individual. My essay takes the idea that organizations are anti-individual because of their history. I think there is some merit in both points of view.
> it's not unreasonable to consider that Facebook could easily become the next Adwords as well; not even Google can currently predict the future.

lol
Another telling anecdote: I was watching graduation a couple months back, and before they hand each person the degree the dean says, "I confer upon you this degree with all the rights and privileges associated with it." Last time I checked, in America a degree conferred no special rights or privileges. I love though how they look you in the eyes and lie to you while they're handing you the degree. Classy.
How do companies get funded then that:

1. Aren't VC funded
2. Aren't angel funded

Before you answer, keep in mind that 550,000 businesses are started EVERY MONTH in the U.S. alone. VC's fund less than 4,000 of those each YEAR.

You must have some kind of insight that 23 million small business owners don't.
I think his point is that companies that can't get funded usually won't be successful, because there has to be something wrong with them to not get funded. Only someone who lives in the Valley and sees how easy it is for someone reasonably connected to get funded could have this attitude.

This isn't always true but there's at least some truth there.
We all know Silicon Valley is the quintessential barometer for how all companies are funded and started.
Very nice analogy, and I think it captures why some "agile" teams I've worked on felt so productive - a small group could jam on something and have a shared understanding of the problem as we were working. However, as with a band, there's definitely an upper bound. 2, 4, 6 programmers - awesome. 12 programmers - starts to fall apart pretty quickly.
Reads okay until you realize it's an advertisement for Greenspun's class. His proof of how well it works is that most people who take it like it (not surprising, given its reputation as too much work unless you know you like it) and that most people who take it work at Microsoft and Google (he fails to note just how many MIT grads do the same thing without his course).

There was enough blatant self-interest here that I couldn't make it through to the end.
So how do you think this will be settled? The easiest and most logical thing to do is to allow the banks to process the off-shore casino transactions but I'm afraid that Bush would rather take down the WTO as one of his last major actions.
Thank you Paul! AFAIC, this was your best essay ever. (And that's saying alot). You have just described what has been in my head for most of the past year, but I didn't have the words to describe it.

A good friend of mine is a artist. He claims his secret is, "I paint every day." I tried that. It didn't work for me.

I have tried every combination of pens, tablets, paper, sticky notes, and electronic approach to distill my thinking and none of it has ever made much difference.

Only when I get the entire program in my head (level 0 only), do things get cooking. I rewrite everything 3 or 4 times. Sometimes I rewrite just to understand.

This approach reminds me of Jessica Livingston's chapter on Steve Wozniak in "Founders at Work" (required reading). Only when he could get the entire Apple II into his head did it become the breakthrough that it was.

I used to be afraid to exercise because it took time away from programming. What a mistake. I walk up and down steps for 35 minutes every morning WITH MY PROGRAM LOADED INTO MY HEAD. THAT'S when I do my best design work. I didn't realize what was happening until just now. Thank you!
+1 for reading TFA. More of that FTW.
Does anyone here remember the three martini lunch? It seems ridiculous enough that I find it hard to believe it actually existed.
Since you quit, do you mind telling us the idea or their website?
Remember that Lifehacker post about Seinfeld's productivity secret? I made a small site based on it.
The post: http://lifehacker.com/software/motivation/jerry-seinfelds-pr...

I tried a paper calendar on my wall for a few days after I read that. Then I decided this was a good chance to do something in python which I've been looking to learn.

Looks like palish is working on something based on the same post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45374
The exact date reddit became cesspool-ized was October 31, 2006. Getting bought put reddit at the top of slashdot and other sites creating the eternal september effect.

After October 31, reddit started having hundreds of votes and hundreds of comments on articles. Now we get to wake up to the front page's top five links being [pic] along side the never ending banter of it's-a-conspiracy/it's-not-a-conspiracy.
Linux vs. BSD: Huge difference in UI responsiveness
If you apply and get rejected and don't go after your idea anyways then they were right to reject you. I know that sounds harsh but failure and rejection are common-place in startups, YC or not. If your idea can't sustain rejection from a program as competitive as YC then it is the wrong idea or you are the wrong person to make it happen. It's like saying, "I didn't get into MIT so I'm not going to engineering school."
I can take the argument that credentials don't tell the whole story. In fact, I think Marilee Jones pretty much changed the face of college admissions (in a good way). Also, she let me in, which means I owe her a pretty large debt...

However, it's really tough to argue for Marilee Jones' job in this situation. She had decades to tell someone that she had falsified her resume and chose not to. Instead, she was found out by some 3rd party and everyone acted in order to save face. MIT fired her, but let her resign. She admitted to lying, but blamed it on a youthful mistake when it was really a continual withholding of information she knew to be pertinent. I suspect had she admitted this wrong doing a long time ago, and without the threat of a PR nightmare from an outsider's expose, she might still have a job now.
If I remember right from high school physics class, hitting it at a greater angle will get you a better reflection, and hence better sound quality.
I use //TODO: in my Visual Studio stuff. VS will find them for you automatically, I don't even have to grep for them.

I also try to write code so small and simple that it approaches the complexity of "Hello World." That way, it's easy to find the bugs.
Could you add a question mark to the title? What kind of alchemy turns a first-hand rumor into a second-hand fact?

Edit: poof
I have an alternative explanation on why taking breaks can be beneficial. I'm less of a fan of the subconscious theory--it can certainly happen but I think it's much less common than people estimate.

What I think is more likely is that you get fresh insight when returning to a problem after a break, because the mental model that was constructed in your head was subtly wrong. It's happened to me a bunch of times: "OK, where was I?... the grommit plugs into the foobar, and the whatzit sends a message to the widget... wait a minute, no it doesn't, it sends to the frobnosticator first! WHY on earth was I thinking that for all that time before the break??"

Sometimes it's as simple as the famous case of getting somebody else to look at your code and immediately point out what's wrong that two hours of staring at the screen couldn't accomplish.

Other times it's a lot more subtle, high-level and abstract. Since, in those cases, it's often difficult to discuss the problem with somebody else, you don't get a) the outside feedback to speed things along and b) the humiliation factor that makes you remember how the insight came about. ;) So the meta-revelation of how you came to that revelation might be lacking, and it's attributed to the subconscious instead.
big mistake! downmod for not being a PG fanboy.

edit: (seriously)
This is "Hacker News" , formerly "Startup News", not "Small Business Bad Advice News". Your post doesn't contain any real content, it is just SEO spam for your website.
College students are an exception. There's a lot of social pressure to not drop out of college to start a company and YC provides a socially acceptable excuse for postponing college. This made PG and co increasingly uncomfortable over time which is why they started preferring college graduates. I realize that someone truly dedicated could still work an idea full time while in college. But this is hard, and it's even harder to get a team to hack with you.
I'm surprised that people disagreed with my C recommendation (although, note that I did say Python or Ruby if you want to get something done quickly). Learning C isn't really about learning C, it's about learning how the computer actually does things (aka pointers, memory management, etc.). Knowing C lets you understand concepts in higher level languages easier. For example, "pass by reference" is easy to understand once you have passed around some pointers. It helps you understand what the garbage collector is doing, and why it's doing it. It helps explain why even in managed languages sometimes you need to "free()" something (an example is bitmaps in C#).

Would you rather start programming on the surface (not knowing what is happening underneath) or would you rather start by learning the hard stuff underneath? I, personally, would rather know what is happening underneath. Is there an argument for learning the more surface stuff first? Maybe I'm off nuts and have a slanted view because I learned Java, Scheme and then C.
way to support your empty argument above.
Thanks for doing this! I actually printed out calendars and have been making X's but this is so much cooler...
its like he knows me
Greenspun's class goes back as much the online communities started to become reality. It's among the first, if not the first in academia, for engineering internet applications in a time nobody even considered collaboration and online communities worth.
One thing it doesn't need is advertisment!

Nonetheless, your arguments collide. If the percentage of people who get employed by Goog and Ms is the same as of those MIT students not taking it, then your argument that this is advert of the course is fault. So, you cancel your own argument.