skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Once it's on Digg, it usually ends up syndicated on many other sites, and generally the word gets out. It helps a lot with inlinks, blog posts, etc. This just seems like something simple we could all provide for each other.
I do 99% of my work in a terminal and usually over ssh. that's why I use Emacs.

Since you use a single return statement I'm assuming you keep track of the value to return by assigning it to a variable. How is keeping track of multiple assignments to the variable you will return easier than keeping track of multiple return statements? I've always found it easier to keep track of return statements since they're highlighted.
His password was changed, so I would assume .mac support gave the guy a link to reset the password.
With Summize, Twitter to Buy a Clue
People then were still inclined to form opinions more from experience than information.
Just saw this on Ajaxian:

http://ajaxian.com/archives/the-pencil-project

http://www.evolus.vn/Pencil/Home.html
Well, ideally your employees who were let go would make a nice chunk off of stock options. Not FU money for the latter half most likely, but a business with 100 employees will generally sell for a pretty good chunk of money.
Why Paul Graham is wrong about New York City
This paper makes a pretty compelling argument against threads as a model for concurrency:

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-1....? [pdf]
Web companies organize massive effort to patch fundamental Internet flaw
Bit.ly: Please Use This TinyURL of the Future
The nice thing about Interface Builder style tools is it doesn't generate actual code, it saves "freeze dried" versions of the objects. It's also free and very easy to use.
It's really nice to know that I could tighten my belt so much more.
Tidbit along the same lines from the article below: the combined market cap of American, United, Delta, Continental, Northwest, and US Airways is $5.7 billion.

http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/news/2008/07/portf...
Yes, it's helpful. Just like buying a lottery ticket theoretically means that you stand a chance to win $x^n.

If you can get some interest, then by all means go for it. I just think that you will find that the "exposure" is worth less than the effort required to gain it (and I recognize that the effort is low).
I think he is complaining more that so many other people think that threads are the secret sauce.
Not to mention you are creating an artificially low barrier of entry to your market. Like what happened when Google AppEngine was released with a /sample/ app that mimicked theirs.
Start with Stumble Upon. Less work and more traffic.
Well I've gotten plenty of exposure, I just thought the small effort might go a long way. Plus like I said, it just seems like a good boost we could help each other with.
There are plenty of venture-backed companies based in NYC, including many that weren't funded by the many NYC-based VC firms and many by first-time entrepreneurs. E.g., Meetup.com was backed by DFJ in Menlo.
I know that Georgia and Verdana are both Microsoft-made fonts designed for screen reading, that is, around pixel boundaries.

However, if most the studies cited in this article are to be believed, then there's no conclusive evidence pointing to a specific font or style of font that is "better" for reading on a computer, only personal preference.
Missing the point. No matter what the crime being committed, he trusted the authorities without reciprocation. Huge liability for him and Atari. Consider:

1) Would you help a stranger recover a stolen item from the perpetrator?

2) If you were in Mexico, and Mexican authorities asked you help them catch someone they labelled a criminal, would you do it?

Read about the experiences of Steven Hatfill and Rick Convertino as a reminder of why trust relationships are easily abused by governmental power.
I am with you. In my mother language, there are also a few characters which have special small signs above them, but I still think using them in URL will be a disaster. Websites which have such characters in their names will be forced to register both names (with and without special chars)...or...maybe that's the point?!
Ask YC: why should I not switch from Google search?
I have experienced so many times that I get desired results by searching on Yahoo than Google, this is not recently but from the time when Google was not so popular, it was hard for me to switch from Yahoo to Google and I still wonder why I shouldn't switch back to Yahoo?

Have you experienced the same and do you have any compelling reason to only use Google and nothing else?
Revelations from Rails Source 4
Maybe that's part of the problem... the echo chamber of people building things that don't have a clear market, or it's "just technology" and not a business by itself.
How do you get a site popular on Stumble Upon - just get tons of people to favorite it?
And I should point out the title was maybe a little over the top... the article doesn't really say you shouldn't start a company in SV, i.e., that you should move away... just that there are compelling reasons to consider not moving to SV to start that company.
As far as I'm concerned, VeryLongIdentifiers are easier to scan (for small values of "very"). VeryLongIdentifier is actually a reasonable length, though any more than this does get unwieldy.
Here you go:

http://pastie.org/230109

Want the punch line? OSX getpid averages under 100 cycles; snprintf (no IO) averages over 1000.
Click on links, like they always have? :)

Almost no one types an URL. They type search terms and follow links. And needless to say, if you can't type the URL in its native language, you're unlikely to be able to read the page anyway.

And if you really need to be able to see a normalized ASCII representation, it's still there. Non-ASCII DNS names are actually stored in "punycode", a semi-readable 7 bit printable encoding:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
You lost me on this one... If you like Yahoo better, use Yahoo.
It seems like ICANN is doing everything possible to blackmail the big companies into spending a crapload of money to cover their trademarks. First the .google/.ebay, and now this.

English is supposed to be the universal language for the internet, what this will do is make things a lot harder for everyone. We'll see brand dilution, since instead of simply registering google.ru, google will need to also own гугл.com/.ru/.net./org/.biz etc etc
Absolutely agree with you about needing a well defined scope and how that can reduce the chance of an overrun. Likewise, laying the hammer down simply because an arbitrary deadline is on the calendar isn't good project management.

But I still argue that a good, reasonable deadline that everyone on the team has a say in setting acts as a commitment -- the team is saying, "yes, we agree to deliver a product in this timeframe." Once you've made that commitment, the deadline then acts as a forcing factor that drives everyone to prioritize the most important tasks.
Upmodded.

I throw myself before the mercy of the court. The mistake is entirely mine. I am unworthy to live. Please accept a free s/apologist/apologizer/ and I'll try to do better in the future.

(Seriously, I had "apologizer" in there, but then my brain threw out "apologist" and it looked and sounded so much better. Pity about the meaning, though.)

UPDATE: From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary:

Apologizer, n. One who makes an apology; an apologist.

Apologist, n. [Cf. F. apologiste.] One who makes an apology; one who speaks or writes in defense of a faith, a cause, or an institution; especially, one who argues in defense of Christianity.

I'll squint at that pair of definitions and say: I regret my choice of words, but not enough to go back and fix it.
I'm pretty sure this is already being done on a large scale, so I'm guessing the concept has been proven. I believe energy companies also subsidize households that go this way, so you can use that for marketing etc
While it's true that there are many abbreviations of "message," surely some are inherently easier to cognitively process than others. Compare:

"eag", "sg", "msa" -- randomly chosen letters (in orig order) vs.

"age", "meg","mag" -- purposefully misleading substrings, vs

"msg", "mes", "mssg" -- closer to semantic content

My point is not so much to quibble, but to suggest that we may have something to learn from cognitive psychology on the subject. Does anyone recall the recent study that showed taht as lnog as the fsrit and lsat lteters of wrods wree the smae, poplee culod gnerlaly mkae out the manenig? (whew! hard to type that.) This suggests to me that at the very least, retaining the first letter is important, and possibly the last as well.

My qualm about single letter variable names is that they may require more "lookup time" (on average) because so much of the semantic content has been stripped from the name. I'm curious if anyone has actually researched this? I'm only theorizing here.
That's fine, no one is trying to convince you. I personally have no stake at all in changing your mind, nor did I imply so. Don't feel threatened.

I was just trying to say that people identify themselves with a viewpoint and then their ego silently but consistently defends the viewpoint since defeating the viewpoint diminishes the ego's self-worth. Reading an article, for example, then becomes an analysis, "friend or foe." It is either something to agree with and reinforce the ego's stance or something to attack since the ego is being threatened.

Anyway, too much psychobabble already...
Is there some tendency for people to falsely claim they have Asperger's disorder?
"House of Hype" Sponsorship Opportunity
pretty much. There's no "front page" to get to on stumble upon. Every person who thumbs the site up essentially forwards the stumbled page to everyone on their friends list. Interesting sites propagate through stumble upon very quickly.
I had the same trouble, couldn't figure out how to get my mac to deal with hiragana/katakana/kanji input a while ago when learning japanese. Anybody know how to do this?
Yea my last site got "stumbled" a bunch of times. Serious amount of traffic but I read that you really are only getting half of what your stats say because of how the software works. Not sure. Still good though.
Yea I would prefer to use Emacs but I don't get access to that all the time. Thus my returns don't always get highlighted so it's as if I am using a basic text editor.

In addition, I tend to read code from the bottom up (literally), so I end up tracing that return value upwards through the code. Also, having some simple branching let's me quickly identify what each block of code is doing.

Clearly there is not one way to do things and there are times where it's significantly easier to just return in the beginning but for more advanced cases I like having variables keep track.

Also, when there are many steps involved in the computation, it's easier to keep track of the individual pieces and then combine them at the very end than have that logic dispersed throughout the function.

I have also recently started favoring returning hashes so in case I ever need to add some additional results, backwards compatibility is preserved and I only need to work on one return statement.
Bit.ly: a TinyURL of the Future
Actually, there's a few companies out here in California that come out and install Solar panels on your roof with no cost to you. You use what you need for your house, then I guess they make money by selling off the excess power. I'm not totally sure how it all works but I do have a couple coworkers who swear by it.
Probably going against the grain here, but that was spot-on. PG's analysis of NYC in that article made me wince, especially that nonsense about restaurants and jackets. I also snorted at the notion that NYC is all about money. It is such a large and diverse city that I find it difficult to suggest that it is all about ANY one thing.
Scott Heiferman founded a successful company prior to Meetup, and took funding after the Dean campaign put Meetup on CNN.

But look, I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying what you probably already know: Bay VC looks at you funny if you're not in the Bay.
It's about the quality of traffic as well. Quality readership does not really exist on digg.
projections for 2008 was +50% growth. vmware didn't manage that, but it's not a reason to oust the ceo.

this is a highly political move
You know I was cleaning this weekend and apparently I missed the start of "Put the smack-down on PG" week. Any way I can catch up by Friday? Suggestions PG? I have a tentative work entitled "Why PG is wrong about the color of the HN menubar," but I'm not sure it has the same pizzaz as this other stuff we're seeing.
Of course. Without a doubt. It really does help get the word out. A lot of people visit through digg, digg articles get syndicated all over, most end up high on delicious, bloggers write about digg articles, etc. I said before, if this is something we could propagate for each other - why not try?
New Gmail Features Protect from Snooping
Microsoft on Vista: ‘The time of worry is over’
You can also pay $0.05 per visitor. The trick is to make sure your site is immediately appealing, otherwise the user will just click "stumble" and go on to the next site.

http://www.stumbleupon.com/ads
Third time in three days: http://searchyc.com/If+you%2527re+open+to+growth%252C+you+te...

I wish NYT would get a decent URL naming scheme so YC's system would pick them up.
Maybe its not all about money, but its definitely more about money. Coming from Wisconsin and working in Manhattan, I find my midwestern frugalness is completely alien to people. Time is money here, there is no doubt about it. Walking three blocks and taking a subway ride gets thrown out the window in favor of a $20 cab ride. Its the small stuff but it adds up. When a city suffers a shortage of BMWs after Wall Street bonuses come out, its hard to say its not about money.
So, whoever wrote this clearly did not read the right perl documentation, everything the author talks about is VERY well explained in the perl man pages which are pretty much a source of gold.

The argument that Python is better beacause it is apparently more readable is lame. To me, perl just feels a lot more expressive since I grew up "thinking" in perl.

Bashing a language because you didn't read the right documentation and/or couldn't find it is just wrong.

I agree that perl can be daunting to learn and that may make it more unmaintainable though, but if you haven't made the effort don't knock the language.
We always want to 'make money' in the traditional sense. If we loose sight of that we're gonna party like it's 1999.

(yes, we do make money)

(and yea, I worked in a Prince quote!)
Is this article flame bait?

Hmmm... Let's read the following posts and find out!
Questions from a young developer that "just" started working aka: how do you manage it?
I've just become 24 and I've been working with computers since I was 12, got my own when I was 14. I've been programming for more then 10 years now and I was capable of spending days behind my computer screen. But since I started working things have changed for me. I don't have any personal projects anymore, not because I don't have time, but just because I just don't _feel_ like it. I have idea's in my head but can't seem to think them out into a good project. I just got a new job (with a raise and a lot closer to where I live) and sometimes for some reason I can't get simple things to work, while I know I wouldn't have had any problem with them 3 years ago. Am I getting burned up? Too much stress? Do you have the same issues? Or did you have them and got rid of them? Feedback very much appreciated!
The point of submitting this wasn't to pick on pg -- it's a thoughtful piece, and adds a new voice to the discussion. Interesting conversations have two sides.
This is actually a browser issue, and was anticipated long before. A valid workaround would be to allow for input in Unicode, but display the url output in Punycode.

I'm pretty sure most popular browsers already account for this vulnerability. At the very least, Mozilla-forked browsers should still have a built-in defense against homograph attacks. [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=279099#c135]
I'd upvote you twice if I could.

You don't even have to look at the screen if you follow a consistent rule of not abbreviating.

If you do abbreviate, does your buddy use the same scheme? Consistently? Why optimize for typing speed when memory and "variable lookups" are the bottleneck?
That's an interesting idea. Do you see any evidence in the original article that this is the issue with which the author was having moral problems? I don't see anything like that.
When my Mom is trying to discuss something that she thinks I should be doing, I don't disagree, I always agree. It's kryptonite to parental worries. Statements like "if I truly wanted to be like that, I would be doing that. And since I'm not, it's obvious that I'm not committed"
Frankly, it's almost impossible to find good engineers in NYC. The banks do take them all, that doesn't mean that it's impossible to start up in the city, it is just harder.

On the west coasts, startups compete with other startups and employees bounce around making similar amounts of money. In New York, startups compete with financial institutions which can and do throw enormous amounts of cash at employees without a second thought, hence the startups can't compete.

I have to agree with the echo chamber part of things though, startups in NYC are doing different things than startups on the west coast, but maybe that's because there's just fewer startups here that there's more ideas to go around...
You'd think Pitt+CMU, A2+UMich, Champaign+UIUC, and Atlanta+GATech would be hotter startup centers. Graham wrote a big long essay about what makes Palo Alto perfect for startups, but I think the answer mostly boils down to "network effect".
If you locate what you want on Google then use it. If you don't find what you want try another search engine. I find it hard to believe people consciously ONLY use Google and don't go elsewhere if they cannot find what they are looking for.
I left Perl a long time ago and lately have been using Python almost exclusively. That said, statements like this:

> insert the same bug into the X programs.

raise an eyebrow. In my experience the platform and language determine what the what the bugs will be. Said more simply: You aren't going to have the same bugs in Perl that you will in Python, and vice versa. Certainly you could, but typically you won't.

Also, the biggest problem with Perl isn't the language per se, it is the entrenched culture which is inclined to abuse of power and unclear coding, often in the name of "efficiency".

Still, Python drives me nuts daily with small things. I can't think of a language or platform that doesn't. Better yes, but not at a level to pick on Perl.

Oh, and I'm rusty but I'm pretty sure that regex is wrong.
What's particularly foolish is that he's appealing to an authority that most iPhone fans find completely ridiculous: The app design standards of existing handheld platforms.

Most iPhone fanatics love their phone because it's branded as a completely new approach to the design of a handheld platform: A real browser, an intelligent approach to voicemail, a first-class music and video player, etc. Whether or not each and every one of these things is truly unique and revolutionary is beside the point: That's the brand, that's the message. In that environment, appealing to your ten years of handheld experience is like advertising your COBOL skills.
Do Unto Other Social News Sites As You Would Have Them Do Unto You?

To try to vote-stuff Digg would be to condone vote-stuffing of News.YC, too.

Alternate suggestion: just submit your site here for peer review. Include a Digg-this button on your entry page, as appropriate. Then those moved to Digg it will... without any unseemly quid-pro-quos or voting bloc behavior.
I am a reformed indentaholic. Now I adore early returns and use them often. If you follow the first cardinal rule of OOP, keep methods short, then early returns are easy to spot.

This kind of short-sighted nesting annoys me:

function foo(bar) {
if (bar == 1) {
doThis();
} else {
var x = doSomething();
if (x == 2) {
doSomethingElse();
} else {
var y = doThat();
// ... more code here ...
for (var m=0; m<y; m++) {
doBoo(m);
}
}
}
}

Yuck! I much prefer:

function foo(bar) {
if (bar == 1) {
doThis();
return;
}

var x = doSomething();
if (x == 2) {
doSomethingElse();
return;
}

var y = doThat();
// ... more code here ...
for (var m=0; m<y; m++) {
doBoo(m);
}
return;
}

The difference here is not drastic in this short example but in functions with 50+ lines of code it's very clear.

The average person's short term memory is only 5 - 7 items deep. 3 of those slots are already occupied with what they are doing, so you have 2 slots left, maybe 4 slots if they've had their coffee and are really paying attention. Every time you make a code indent, whether it be a loop or nested condition, then you're asking the reader to remember that context switch. Once you have indenting more than two tabs deep then you're in hazy territory where the reader is unlikely to remember all of the conditions that lead to those lines of code being executed.
Yes, Domain Tasting Will End
This actually relatively simple on a Mac. All you have to do is go to International settings in Preferences and select check Japanese as an input language. Then you can select between the character sets and languages from the menu bar (or your desired hotkey).

One of the major reasons I switched to a Mac was because font rendering was a lot clearer for East Asian languages.
What was changed recently in this department ? I know the timeout was increased, but I used to be able to work around the "expired link" message by going back to the "Add Comment" form and refreshing the page. Now this also yields "expired link" and destroys the post text in the process ! I just lost good 30+ minutes of typing, and I ain't going to re-type it, so it is everyone loss .. :)

Please do something about this, it was a minor annoyance before, but now it turned into a pretty major headache.

Also, the 'Preview' button would be very nice to have. I know there's a delay setting, but that's not it. I want an ability to privately preview what I've wrote, before posting anything.
Maybe it's a Manhattan thing. I live in Brooklyn, and I encounter some awesomely frugal people.

Also, it may be an Alchian-Allen thing: if you're paying a fixed cost just to live in the city, luxury is comparably less of an indulgence. See: http://www.nationalpost.com/loveandsex/story.html?id=296085
I've not spent enough time in NYC to judge for myself but based on what I've read and seen (e.g. http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2008/07/02/2/an-appreciatio...) I've come to think that NYC is really all about ambition.
Wow. This going to come back to slap EMC in the face, just like what happened back with Moshe Yanai. It looks like the EMC management can't retain it's most valuable employees.