skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Start-ups should be a temporary economic blip. In our lifetime, we should either see convincing virtual reality, or be sitting on the beach sipping umbrella drinks served by robots which have taken over all "work" positions.

It's beyond the pale that with our present technology and abundance that we still use "being out on the street and starving to death" as a stick to make people work dead-end jobs. At least, if you'd like a future where all human beings are valued and cared for simply because they are human.

For crying out loud, it's the 21st century and the world still has human slavery. Don't judge your country based on it being better than the worst -- that encourages a race to the bottom. Judge it from a future perspective; science fiction has offered plenty of promising visions for humanity.
It's not too difficult. It's what the E-2 visa was designed for.. for people to come to the US and start (or, rather, "invest in" businesses). All you need is to invest about $100,000 into a company, either one of your own creation, or one you're going to take over, and you're in for two years (and then indefinitely if the business continues to make reasonable revenue). There are no quotas on this visa and application times are very quick, whereas the H-1B ties you to an employer (totally useless for your own company), etc.

The L-1 visa is another option if you have a company and you want to set up a US office while maintaining the company in your home country, which can be harder to do but is most likely "cheaper".
Ah, I just realized this probably won't work for you. I don't now for sure, but Jamaica probably isn't a "treaty" country, which E visas demand applicants have citizenship of.
If users trust you with their passwords, you can use the HTTP Identity API provided by news.yc. That is submit a POST directly to the login page (y?u=username&p=password, but POSTed). If "Bad login." is in the resulting page, that's not them.
A good cover letter - written from scratch specifically for the job you are applying for - is the best way to get a foot in the door, especially with craigslist ads, where there might be 200 applicants with similar resumes.

It shows initiative, creativity, and a desire for that SPECIFIC job.
Yeah, I thought of that. However, I wanted to come up with a solution that never involved them giving me their y combinator password.
I had one teacher in public school, in fifth grade, who insisted you didn't need to ask permission to go to the bathroom. I didn't get that much freedom again until I got to college.
Microsoft Tafiti Is Beautiful, But Will Anyone Use it?
How a Fox-linked hacker failed to fool Fark
An operating system is a lot of things -- it would be more precise to talk about a "web userland".
"How to Change the World", apparently by reading about Craigslist job ads, Facebook postcards, "celeb heads", and how to get an autographed copy of his book.

Getting a job on CL is the complete opposite of what start-up founders want to do, and there's no content on that blog for hackers.
Why can't we just have an internet FS? Compile all the apps down to a few common byte code formats and allow for namespace control via chrooting and similar mechanisms. No more web browser! We'd need to make symlinks more powerful, to enable opening a connection -- but there'd be little in the way of special UI required.
The technology for that is already there with S3 if you take full advantage of ACLs. It would just be a matter of agreeing on a standard for shared access.
Collaboration means sharing ideas, motivating each other, enhancing each others' strengths and compensating for weaknesses.

More than once have I been stumped on a problem, only to run it by a friend and have it solved in 30 seconds. Nothing about the nature of hacking demands that it be exclusively solitary, or exclusively collaborative. There are advantages and disadvantages to each.

Furthermore, an event where you shoot to get an entire project done in a day is a good excercise and a good learning experience.
Why do they need all that?
Can't you think of any options in between?
I was trying to figure out alternatives to "sit in a corner" (detention). Maybe that's the best way, but I wish I knew why.
Has anyone tried out the new weblocks?

http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/weblocks-demo.html

It sounds promising.
Anatomy of the Linux networking stack
Looks like a gimmick made to show off Silverlight. People judge search engines based on speed and usability. This has neither. But it is pretty! :)
I'm sure the metaphor isn't perfect, but I don't think the competition thing is a problem. Academic competition is a huge motivator for a lot of people too. Being first in your class, getting accepted to a good school, etc. There are definitely pros and cons to doing things alone vs a group.
Would you create a "making of" commentary for your site similar to ones for movies and video games?
Presumably such commentary can give potential users the impression that quite a lot of effort has gone into the design and implementation of the site, thus increasing the chances that users will like the result.
Along the same lines as your email scraping idea you could have users create accounts at your site and give them some string to put into their news.yc profile to prove they own that news.yc account. To make it worth their wild the string could be, say, a link that resolves to a map of their location on hackrtrackr.
I dont like the idea of selecting kids for anything at age 5. But I'm not sure its impossible.

One of my most vivid memories of childhood is from about 7 years old, when my brothers class (he was 9 or so) was doing an entrepreneurial project. The premise was a company to build the best paper aeroplane, where longer flights would earn more money which you could spend on more materials. Or something. I remember being obsessed by it, and begging to be allowed to do it as well. The same things I love about startups now (having come back to that realisation after a detour to phd land) is exactly the same as then.

What I love about startups is sort of hard to explain. Its not exactly running my own company, I find little excitement in the idea of a consulting firm. Its really being in that feedback loop of making, selling, reinvesting and growing. Its plugging the outputs back into the inputs, optimizing your clever piece of technology and scaling out of sight.

I desperately want schools to include more of these sorts of projects when my kids (first one on the way, yikes :) go to school. I think entrepreneurship and creativity are deeply linked.
It seems like they really gave in to the luxury that we all want with code that gets old: The Total Rewrite.

I don't think it's always a fatal mistake, especially in something as relatively simple as Reddit. It still seems like a mistake to not transition to their new system piece-meal. I've witnessed this first hand a few times already in doing contract work. I'm pretty gun shy about it now and I definitely buy into what Joel said a lot more than I did before.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles/fog00...
This is the way it usually goes on social sites, you just didn't know that. Reddit's beta page looks like a Slashdot beta page from 2000.
Hi Palish,
Thanks for your response. Some more thoughts...

The challenge is that the current system is generic, it allows you to choose any field of work or study and that choice can be postponed. In your school, that choice is made early and that brings with it a risk.

I think your pain was that 'you' felt mentally caged in the current educational system and that 'you' fixed your pain by making a change. What you seem to be doing now is applying a 'mass fix ' by generalizing/abstracting your problem, and while that works in most cases it may need additional fleshing out. Perhaps the fix for each individual might be more effective, perhaps everyone who feels caged needs to apply an individual patch just like you did rather than fix something which isn't broken when they are in 6th grade. Are we fixing before there is a pain?

Hope these thoughts help you develop your idea. Best of luck.
Cool :) learn something new every day.
Interestingly, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov, spent quite a lot of time teaching in schools, and writing textbooks and articles aimed at that level of audience. This was especially true later in his career. As arguably the greatest mathematician of his time, he inspired many Soviet mathematicians and physicists to make a lot of time for teaching in Schools. Paul Erdos also made a great deal of time to meet with students. More recently, Physics Nobelist Carl Wieman quit the US because his work on physics education wasn't being funded. Of course, these examples don't contradict your statement, but they do make one wonder what is possible.
Give them a hash of their hackrtrackr password plus a secret salt, and have them put it in their yc profile.
Social Media: More on how points can be used to drive user behavior (or, why I keep submitting to YC News)
How to Know You Have Found a Great Startup Lawyer
Evaluating your startup lawyer (or any lawyer for that matter) can be a difficult task because a lawyer's work product tends to be intangible. That is, if you hired someone to build you a bookcase you could test its craftmanship in a matter of seconds. Not the case for the startup lawyer that typically deals in Word and PDF. Therefore, it's good idea to evaluate your startup lawyer in the following ways to determine if you have found a keeper.
Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory
maybe disqus can solve this. Linked to from another interesting Joel on Software article: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/07/20.html
"... the more founders you have, the worse disagreements you'll have. When there are just two or three founders, you know you have to resolve disputes immediately or perish. If there are seven or eight, disagreements can linger and harden into factions." -- How to Start a Startup
If I had a school, I wouldn't have any punishments; only warnings and bans.

It's not your right to detain anyone, nor to scare anyone. When students cause undue trouble for others, just tell them why that is not acceptable and inform them they need to change their behaviour or leave. Not as a scare measure, but so they know their situation so they can make a decision. If they don't want to attend this school, or if causing trouble is more important for them than that, they're best out. The main problem with behaviour in public education is that you can't ban the bullies and assholes except maybe in extreme cases.
Equal is optimal though. It's a matter of debate how much each is contributing but there's no debating whether 50% is half or not.
Happy birthday! What day did you actually embark on this project?
Why can't this system work before college?

This is a serious question. I'm sure the idea isn't exactly brand new, so why hasn't it worked? There's gotta be some kind of problem, but I'm not seeing it...
Well, I wrote Weblocks.

It's already very nice (using Lisp turned out to be really great) but some fairly commonly requested features are not yet in. Give it a try, send some questions to the support group, and see if it's right for you.
SproutCore: the Javascript MVC behind the .Mac photo galleries
Example: http://gallery.mac.com/emily_parker
From the article: "[Legalese] doesn't use modern techniques like subroutines or standard libraries."

Hey, maybe these guys will be the ones to change that:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44361
This was done in the CD-ROM days, like in Myst. Customer response card claimed they liked it.
Greystripe Hits 14 Million Downloads Of Free Mobile Games
I don't deny the problems with the measure. I think a single number doesn't make much sense.

But my intuition is that you could fairly accurately rank people by intelligence, even if the quantitative number is ill defined.

People are different. Some are better than others in real ways. Many criticisms of IQ I've seen start with the a priori assumption that somehow differences mean lower worth. Reduced to absurdity, this leads to accusations of neo-eugenics.

I don't believe that any human is worth less than another, so I have no problem saying that some people are more intelligent than others when it is obvious.

Here is why it really matters: if we better study intelligence, we're well suited to learn to control it.

Significant artificial increases in human intelligence would be as important as the computer revolution.
The First Web 2.0 Burger Joint and 30 Menu Suggestions
I found our lawyer at a party in a bar... if you can hang and split a beer together, you know you'll get along.
thanks for finding this, it was helpful re AI issues i encountered today. ;-D
What's interesting to me is whether such commentary has a positive impact on the core product by showing people just how much work went into it.

Moreover, I would like to know whether such commentary is feasible for web services. Would people find it compelling?
Does anyone know the price?
Except for the minor detail that he was elected time and again by overwhelming majority.

The reasoning behind the clock change is medically sound. Other countries do it to save electricity. I don't understand your WTF-ness, guys, it's not as if he had decreed pi to be 3.
Blender Tutorials:  Required reading for entrepreneurs?  First impressions are everything after all.
Thank you, Zak. I'm going to look into that book.
It would certainly be easy to make. I would favor better edited content than testimonials in front of a webcam. Those are really boring.

My intuition is that people don't care how much work you've put in.

They care if you care. They like humanized companies. They like to be entertained.

I think it could work, but show it to a few people before showing it off to the world.
Programming and legal are exactly alike: they try to make a precise and unambiguous set of rules and procedures with words. They try to translate language into reality. The difference is that the language of programming has to abide by physics and logic, while the logic of legal has to abide by the flaws of language.
By simply removing the obstacle (traditional schooling in this case), doesn't that cheapen the creation?

This would be the greatest hack in the fucking world. Replacing the traditional school system.

There will always be restrictions and great things to create. Don't you want more people having the chance to create fantastic things and crush obstacles left and right?
Finally, Twitter Adds Search
Spooks Get Their Own MySpace
Dynamic image manipulation technology using "energy seams"
Web 2.0 = web app + 2 founders + 0 revenue
Here's the paper. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1276377.1276390

Also got some coverage on an Adobe blog which makes me think they want to duplicate this functionality as soon as possible. http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2007/08/holy_crapworthy.html
AJAX SQL Schema Designer. Outputs in any format
= Google at 6 months.
Compared to something like Ruby, it's a lot less forgiving.
Science of Magic
Time for Hacker News API!
News.YC Library
Piggybacking on the recent Where to Start Programming and Hacker School Threads... What texts and works do you feel are essential and should be a part of every hackers library.

Looking for books and also free online material. Any topic from strict programming texts to more abstract works.

I'll start:

Church-Turing Thesis: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/church-turing/
But that won't cause anyone to change their behaviour. Troublemakers will only see "warnings" as a sign that there are no consequences, and won't believe they'll get kicked out until it does happen. There has to be a middle ground between no punishment (warning) and getting kicked out.

You can't just explain abstract consequences to a kid and expect them to react the same way as a rational adult. Some might, most won't.
The paper you linked is behind a paywall :(

Here's a free version from the author himself:

Paper: http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/imret.pdf

Hi-rez video: http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/IMRet-All.mov

PS: This stuff is probably in the process of getting patented. Adobe will have to license it. Few years back Adobe got into a lot of trouble for "stealing" healing brush from one guy. He sued them and I think they settled.
sorry about that and thanks for the link, I'm gonna miss my University tunnel when I graduate/drop out.
http://rockstartup.com/
This is a great tool. I voted it up but it didn't count because I'm on the same IP as the submitter.
Harrowing.
Ideally, how long should a submission be?
A lot of the time, I'm looking for bite-sized clips, and get 11-page monstrosities. Sometimes things work out the other way around. How long should the ideal post be? Would it be good to show it's length?
Is this supposed to be irony? What is this poorly written rambling doing on "Hacker News?"
Hacker news? maybe that's not going to attract all the interesting classic redittors...
What about those who wouldn't consider themselves "hackers" (even if they are, for the hacker encyclopedia). I'm speaking, for example, about scientists of all kind, artists, writers, etc. Real life hackers, but also hackers that wouldn't know that hacking isn't about programming but about a way to deal with knowledge.

Are they just going to stay in Reddit, wouldn't it be better if those came to the "hacker news" too?
"What seems to have worked best for cultures is to play off the men against each other, competing for respect and other rewards that end up distributed very unequally. Men have to prove themselves by producing things the society values."

=

"Make something people want."
don't drop out :)
That is beyond awesome.
http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

http://norvig.com/paip.html

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
It's just a fantasy, I do Industrial Engineering and it's a truly miserable field. I get to drop out and move to NYC if my company hits 300k revenue next year.
In no particular order:

The Art of Computer Programming, by Knuth

Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools by Aho, Sethi, and Ullman (the dragon book)

Structure & Interpretation of Computer Programs, by Abelson and Sussman

On Lisp, by Graham

A First Course in Database Systems, by Ullman and Widom

The C Programming Language, by Kernighan and Ritchie

The Cathedral and the Bazaar, by Raymond
There's no such thing as a forgiving language. If your program is wrong, it won't work.
That wasn't a smug weenie thing. It was funny. I was going to suggest web.py just for giggles.
Godel Escher Bach, by Hosfstadter
From reddit:

language agnostic books:
http://programming.reddit.com/info/1y0ux/comments

language specific books:
http://programming.reddit.com/info/1y9cj/comments
Domain Driven Design

http://www.amazon.com/Domain-Driven-Design-Tackling-Complexi...
By 2020: Japan aims to Replaces Internet A
Scaling a startup from 0 to 40 hits per second in 3 days
This is not far off from being a first cut at the idea I submitted to YC last cycle.
So was your idea closer to dabble.db?
The Art of Unix Programming by Eric Raymond: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/
Not really. Your program can work for the wrong reasons, if you don't understand what the language is doing.

In C, if you're wrong, chances are your program either won't compile or it'll give you a nice segfault or bus error.

In something like Javascript, you can easily be "wrong" every time because you don't understand an aspect of the language, and still have your program "work" 9 times out of 10.

If your logic is wrong then yes, it doesn't make a difference what language you're using, but that's not what I was talking about.
Scheme is awesome as long as you are mathematically fearless enough to learn from square one using books like How to Design Programs and The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. They provide a great foundation if you feel right at home in math, and you're not too concerned with building something practical for your first project.

For people who aren't as confident in their math, I would recommend Python, as other have mentioned. It's thoroughly friendly to newcomers, there's tons of good documentation (the free tutorial written by Guido is incredible), the libraries are among the best available, and, like Scheme, it's easy to start by biting off a manageable chunk and then gradually learning more details as you go.
Has anyone used Haml? What do you think?
The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
For my 2 cents these are books I read in the past year and was very impressed with the clarity of the presentation.

Theory of Computing. Michael Sipser.

Introduction to Algorithms, by T. H. Corman, C. E. Leiserson, and R. L. Rivest

How to design programs
http://www.htdp.org/2003-09-26/Book/curriculum-Z-H-1.html#no...

I think I will add something that I am interested in, it is not of interest to programmers, but heck, we are hackers!

All the Math you missed: Thomas A Garrity

Mathematics: Form and function. Mac Lane.

These are the first 2 books I would buy if I am interested in math and want to know more. These books are simply index books. They go over the land mark concepts in mathematics along with the key theorems and how they evolved in the historical context. You will be surpriced at how obvious things took years for people to learn and will come to appreciate the value of mathematical knowledge.

The algorithm will be like this: You want to know about some field of mathematics. Say Differential geometry. You can consult the sections on both these books. Will take you about 3 full days. And then go ahead and read the list of suggested books. This is the real gold mine of both these books., they suggest the best books for all of the sub-fields of math. Besides they really list the key theorems in a few pages with proof sketches and this is like a map for you. You can follow the map to exactly where you want. This sort of idea, you will get only after studying that field for say a year. And these books just give it to you right away.

I think we need a continuous thread for this sort of book suggestion, reviews etc.
Microsoft launches pay-as-you-go Office
Using timeout with xmlrpclib
What's scary is trying to write code that implements a legal document. That's when you find out that much legal language is shot through with logical holes big enough to drive a tank through.

I was asked to implement a municipality's recently-revised alarm permit legislation. I read the old legislation, the new legislation and wrote down questions that weren't covered by either (never mind how to handle the transition between rule sets). At a meeting with all the guilty parties and their lawyers no one was able to answer my questions. They were surprised and embarrassed that so many details had been overlooked. An additional constraint was that, given the political climate, the possibility of properly amending the legislation was slim.

I made a list of suggestions to plug the holes and asked for a sign off. No one wanted to accept responsibility. Finally a division chief relented and the details were swept under the political rug as "regulatory implementation".

So my experience is that legal language is far too vague to translate directly to code.
The 2D image processing stuff at Siggraph this year was truly exceptional. I usually skip right through that part of the conference and proceedings, but this year there were a few really cool things.
"... Why can't this system work before college? .... so why hasn't it worked? There's gotta be some kind of problem, but I'm not seeing it ..."

Try these

- http://paulgraham.com/hs.html

- http://paulgraham.com/mit.html
congrats on the great launch!
This was pretty cool too:

http://vis.berkeley.edu/papers/softscissors/
"... create a YCombinator-like process that starts at the K-12 level. Perhaps not as far back as kindergarten, but definitely before 6th grade. Students ..."

So we need to go to school in a structured environment to learn to play with technology, break it down and build it up again?