skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hire a Professional Military to Civilian Conversion Resume Writer
Firefox 3 To Be Released On June 17th
okay, here's a better question:

should startups use sharepoint? im not saying just the hackers/the dev process. also for the business side.
Are we really going to state, as educators, that some people just aren't cut out for thinking rationally?

Speaking as a sometime educator, I think you can afford to lose the last word.
PyGTrends: Python API for Google Trends Data
Google Trends added functionality this week for CSV output of trends data. The code in the post is a quick hack that handles authentication and data munging, allowing you to query google trends directly from python. Should help people get started building some neat trends mashups.
I had the same experience as edw519. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=215204
No. It's too generalized. Find something more specific to your needs. You can make SharePoint into anything, but spend the time building your startup.
An Example Of How Government Doesn't Get Seed Funding
Actually, these test results were not able to be reproduced even by the author(s). So while it was predictive of the set of people the paper was written for, unfortunately it isn't any use outside of that.

Citation - Second comment by the blog's author Mark Guzdial:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK3LAWVXC1EE119
"But the program also requires companies to create or retain at least 100 high-value jobs, defined as above the median industrial wage in fields such as design or engineering, or invest at least $25 million over five years, and it's here where some Ottawa firms get skeptical. "

How exceedingly stupid. The government is focused on how many jobs their fund might create, instead of looking at the potential of the team/idea. And of course, it favors large established companies.

Every time I think about moving back to Ottawa, I read something like this and don't feel as bad about the high cost of living in the Bay Area....
I just spent 5 minutes of my life on http://littlegreatideas.com/willyou/index.php

A good one I found today was http://www.zoomii.ca

Sometimes if I've been working on facebook apps for a while I'll go back to my own site and smile.
Yeah, it's an amazingly useful service.. Love it too.

Nice work on oneryng.. At least reveal the meaning of life though if you know it..
Seconded, I love wufoos design. I needed to set up a simple form for http://facebookcontest.com/contact.html and wufoo just flowed.
I've only been a user of it, not an admin, but I loathe the interface so much that it doesn't matter what else is in there. Shitty version management behind an awkward-as-hell pile of documents, along with some ass messaging thing I have no interest in (that's the parts people have tried to tell me were useful).

It's possible that it's only the "out-of-the-box" interface I hate as I gather that it's customizable, but that's how I've always seen it, and I don't find it usable.
Google Trends added functionality this week for CSV output of trends data. The code in the post is a quick hack that handles authentication and data munging, allowing you to query google trends directly from python. Should help people get started building some neat trends mashups.
Ouch, that sucks for those users...

Jason sneered at the idea of social networking based around storage, but that's actually not a bad idea. Storage itself is boring, but it's the basis of any service really. So if you add more than storing, say like sharing, publishing, and file manipulation (image editing, or Writely perhaps), then you have something particularly useful in a social context.

For example, say you put a bunch of images up on your storage site and now you'd like to publish them as a gallery for your family. Wouldn't it be nice to just select them all and click a "Publish to gallery" button?

Not to toot my own horn, but a previous site of mine did exactly this and about 10,000 users seemed to really like it at the time (I had to shut it down though for various reasons, including being a solo founder and trying to run two company at the same time).

I imagine the future of something like that could be in integrating the various components out there already now like S3 + Google Docs + publishing to various social sites. It just seems disjointed that I have to go to separate websites to access my photos, my calendar, my documents, my friends, etc. and that none of them really work together yet...
Review of the screencast series The Ruby Object Model and Metaprogramming (episodes 1-3)
Wow. That'd be a pretty big list, wouldn't it?

The Crunchbase is the closest thing I know of in a freely accessible form. I guess there are probably a few analysts that cover the industry that have lists, and I guess they'd sell you said lists for a few grand.
Don't worry, it's been suggested several times before. If someone is that "needy" for karma, let them. I prefer to earn mine the old fashioned way.
Saying that all of those apps are the same is a naive interpretation of the services. There's overlap, but that's because a lot of those products started out with disparate purposes and are now being consolidated (Groove+FolderShare is a large part of the current version of Live Mesh). They're iterating on the same idea and realizing a grander solution, albeit very slowly.
Advice given to me during my first startup by a very successful entrepreneur: To succeed, you have to be able to kill a puppy. Don't just think "yeah, I can kill a puppy," but imagine yourself holding a puppy underwater until it stops breathing.

The person dispensing this advice was not talking literally, of course. Starting companies that last until they succeed often means making tough decisions. The kinds of decisions that impact people's well being and future -- and not always in a positive way in the short term. It often means saying "No!" more than saying "Yes."

I was never able to imagine myself killing a puppy, but even going through that process and realizing that I couldn't do it taught me something about who I am and the kind of leader I wanted to be, which was the real purpose of the exercise.
And a preemptive congratulations to any Hackers celebrating their first Father's Day. (This will be my second.)
That works great, unless you want to survive. The right order is 1) Build the product 1) Sell the product. You won't know for sure what you're actually building until you're trying to sell it and have prospects looking at it. And if you're done building before you start selling, you a) won't have anything somebody wants to buy and b) will be flat broke. Just sayin.
I generally hate the meta-conversations about story quality and the necessity for a down-arrow - but this story was the most awful (and obvious flame-bait) story I've seen voted to #1.
Hunting memory leaks in Python
If you believe desktop applications have a future, it's obviously a wonderful innovation. If, on the other hand, you believe that the future of personal computing is "in the cloud", then it is a crazy boondoggle that tries to attach obsolete technology to the Internet.

If, like most of us, you think there isn't an absolute truth on either side, it's probably a relatively effective stopgap measure until Microsoft actually figures out the Internet. History would indicate that they will figure it out, eventually, and history indicates that a large segment of the market probably won't come around until sometime after Microsoft does.

Personally, I think that, in the case of the Internet, Microsoft misunderstood it for far too long, and they've lost their chance to make the rules (thankfully--I've been in the in the technology industry long enough to know that when MS makes the rules, everybody else suffers, including consumers), but they'll still be able to mark out plenty of territory for themselves.
"...Python is a garbage-collected language! How can it leak memory?... The trouble is that sometimes an object created by the test is referenced from a global variable, and that keeps it from being collected"
Share Your Ideas in 3D
Get into a place financially where you can take some risks. One of the biggest things that will stop you from being an entrepreneur is you own bills. Essentially, you'll be able to work on your own projects for as long as you wish as long as your own personal finances don't implode.

After you have some saving built up and some room to roam financially, go ahead and do your own thing.
yea, great job on posting a comment that has nothing to do with this story.
You may want to disallow reassignment, or at least detect circular assignments.
His incentive structure is different from the mainstream financial industry. Buffett invests his own money and doesn't sell his stock: he started the Buffett Partnership with $100K of his own savings. His gains or losses are proportionally equal to that of his investors. I guess maybe the original limited partners had it different (Buffett probably got a larger share of Berkshire for his $100k than the limited partners got), but I doubt any of them are complaining now.

Investing in Berkshire Hathaway is "Heads we both win, tails we both lose. Hope you like betting the same way I do." By contrast, investing in a hedge fund is "Heads I win, tails you lose" and investing in a mutual fund is "Either way I win, tails you lose."
Wise advice. Some of the things you have to do to succeed -- firing dud employees, saying no to early acquisition offers, telling girlfriends that work is more important than them -- are at least as hard as drowning a puppy.

Maybe the next round of YC interviews should have a qualifying event requiring a big tub of water and a trip to the humane society.
join someone else's startup that you are passionate about
I call semi-shennanigans. The writer says they tested about 200 sites. Where is the data list? To state the results of research and to be taken credibly, you have to post your data. Additionally I have to take issue with the use of Alexa for any valid data. There are other alternatives such as Compete.com and Hitwise which are much more accurate.
Andrew, I think that's a really good point about the pot calling the kettle black.

It’s an assumption in Buffett’s argument that Helpers don’t create value; they just take a portion of the pie. This is a fine assumption to make in an imaginary world, but what it requires is that any opportunities that Helpers invest in, and which go on to create value, would have been spotted by the Gotrocks family. So the Helpers don’t spot any new opportunities; they merely charge for advice on investments that would have been made by the Gotrocks family anyway. How applicable is this assumption to the real world? In the real world, there is no such all-seeing Gotrocks family that spots every new business opportunity that arises, and allocates appropriate capital accordingly. If there had been no venture capitalists (who are one kind of Helper) to invest in Sergey Brin and Larry Page when they were starting Google, say, there is no real world Gotrocks family who would stepped in and invested in them. In the case of Google, the VCs did not just take a portion of the pie that would have been created anyway. The Helpers here are partly responsible for the value that Google created.

The actual distinction between a Helper and a non-Helper is not very clear either. If a Helper is an allocator of capital, then all companies are Helpers. VCs allocate capital by buying chunks of companies that, they hope, will create value. Microsoft, say, allocates capital by hiring programmers who, they hope, will create value. Is it possible to draw a distinction between kinds of activities that are value-creating, and kinds that are not? It is hard to see how one could. Perhaps one could try to argue that the activity of buying chunks of companies (as VCs do) is inherently less value-creating than the activity of hiring programmers (as, say, Microsoft does). It doesn’t seem that this argument could work even in principle, as a company that hires programmers, for instance, will frequently pay for them with cash that they have raised from VCs. If the programmers hired by the company create value, the VC is partly responsibility for that.

Buffett’s argument is beguilingly simple, and it took me a while to think through what its assumptions are. When you think it through, it really does look like the key assumption is that Helpers don’t create value. And it seems that this assumption could only be true in Buffett’s imagined world if all business opportunities invested in by the Helpers would have been invested in anyway by the Gotrocks. This is the point where Buffett’s model fails to apply to the real world; there is no real world counterpart of the Gotrocks that would find and invest in business opportunities if Helpers did not exist.
Google CEO Talks Of Good, Evil And Monopoly Fears - NYTimes.com
I wish there were a web app that recommends me gift ideas that doesn't suck. Because every holiday season, I struggle for days to find gifts.

Hey, there's an idea for the adventurous :P
One caveat - keeping the data split apart makes it slightly more difficult to do certain kinds of searches (unless your system supports indexing the concatenation).
Why I moved to Silicon Valley
I come from an "enterprise" environment where all our IT management are goo-goo over Sharepoint. From my personal standpoint Sharepoint is really quite lacking in features. Yeah, it has a Wiki -- but it's no comparison to the likes of say, DokuWiki. Yeah, it has a forum-like portion -- but you could probably pick any of the top 10 forums available for free on the Net and it'd be 10x more powerful than what Sharepoint offers. It's also an online file manager -- with searching and ACLs built-in. Not exactly ground-breaking stuff here.

To pay for this kind-of stuff when there's far better options online and for free seems almost ludicrous to me. Not to mention a terrible waste of money.
This argument goes into some detail about the politics:

http://thenextweb.org/2008/05/03/what-is-adobes-crystal-ball...

"So a taste of what’s next: As Apple jostles it out with Adobe as to whether Flash is going to be incorporated on the iPhone we get a glimpse of what’s at stake for all involved. Live mobile streaming is the hot potato just out of the oven. With services such as Flixwagon and Qik setting new standards, I’m pretty sure that the Adobe Flash’s crystal ball is telling them they need to be at the forefront of mobile streaming.

To grease the wheels they are removing the paid license mobile operators have been incurring worth over 50 million USD annually to Adobe to incorporate Flash in their mobile devices and teaming up with every major player in the market, in effect forcing Apple to play the Flash game or be left out in the cold."
Which technologies are having the greatest impact on information flow in 2008 compared with 2004? YouTube and Facebook stand out for me.
Ask YC: Does anybody enjoy unit testing their code? 
Is it just me? I don't know if I'm just particularly cranky today. After a major refactoring of our app I find myself drained out with unit testing every minor change. Ugh I wish VIM had some automatic unit testing suite similar to some major IDE's...anyone else share my rant?
It depends very much on the environment.

If I'm using Python, I'm happy because it has built-in testing modules I can count on.

There are also cases where Python unit tests are worthwhile for other languages. For instance, I've subclassed unittest to quickly run and diagnose arbitrary Unix programs in isolation, and further subclassed it to help launch specific compiled programs under test.

If I join a team where someone has already done the work of setting up a reasonable test infrastructure, adding and maintaining tests is often OK.

But anything starting from scratch, count me out. :) Sometimes you're thrown into a semi-mature C++ project where they weren't making modules "testable" from the start, and that's way too much effort to retrofit.
http://blinksale.com has a clean, simple interface and a useful service, that also has great business model built in.

Flickr seems so obvious now that people forget how lame online photo sites were before it. Personally, at least for some time, Flickr made me invest more time and energy in taking better photos. It's naturally social, as opposed to glued on "social networking" features for many apps.
$1.2 Billion For iPhone Apps in 2009. What is Gene Munster Smoking?
I know some people who enjoy testing other people's code as a challenge: "lets see what happens when I enter a negative number of days/make an employee their own boss/paste word.exe into that text field..."
Apple cutting rivals out of iPhone navigation?
Samsung’s Instinct Doesn’t Ring True as an iPhone Clone
This isn't much, but it's something: http://startupsearch.org
Someone should collect all the completely idiotic quotes by pundits saying that the iPhone is old-hat in Japan. Quite the opposite. The market is salivating and sick to death of the endless progression of features at the expense of usability.

There are infinite features, and they are all implemented terribly. After v1.0, they just move on to working on this season's new useless feature, rather than actually making the phones work properly.

As a concrete example, Japan has high-speed data on most phones now. But they almost all use built-in browsers that choke to death on a modest web page, sometimes nearly locking up the phone.

A month ago I went in a store to look for a phone that was actually viable for browsing, and the staff told me forget it, just wait for the iPhone. This was the staff whose job it is to stand in the phone area and drive phone sales!
A better example might be shooting a terminally wounded horse or something. Killing a puppy for no reason is just messed up and drowning it is really messed up.
That's the same date as the Spore Creature Creator.

Happy Day ;-)
I really do enjoy unit testing.

Before I got the bug, I was wary of refactoring and adding new features. I would do a few simple tests when I originally wrote the code to satisfy myself that it worked. But then if I'd change the program flow or move things around, the benefit of that ad hoc testing was now lost, and I'd have to do it again.

Unit tests make me feel confident that the stuff I've got really works, even after I've modified it substantially. I'm a lot more likely to make big sweeping improvements because of it.
Big-O stuff, asymptotic notation, Theta notation, analysis of algorithms.
Steven Jenkins - How to Design (Declarative) Programming Languages
Even aside from support pretty unit testing, having a good tool for automating the generation of test cases makes a world of difference. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction_to_QuickChec... for example is a great tool that allows for pretty expressive specifications and counter example generation
The way this site's values are carried forward is the older hands show the newer ones how things are done around here. That sort of community maintenance might happen anywhere, on-topic for the current submission or not.

But heck, if you're really hellbent on not listening to advice, go right ahead doing what you're doing. It's possible your account's karma will wind up in negative numbers and then get deleted, but that's hardly the end of the world, I guess.
Ruby Enterprise Edition is out!  Decrease rails memory by 33% when used with mod_rails
Should be great for people hosting their sites on a VPS, with little ram to work with. I'll certainly be trying it out on my site ASAP!
The Antikythera Mechanism - A 2100 Year Old Mechanical Computer
It is definitely an issue. I agree that many sites are not vulnerable, but too many are by default, including many popular web frameworks, and many, many, many hosts that are on dedicated IP addresses and configured to answer to any host.
You've touched on some good courses already, but make sure to stretch yourself in whatever you take. One major class that you forgot to list is discrete math. It is there that most people first get exposed to proofs and graph theory.

To push yourself, I highly recommend taking (perhaps just sitting in on) a course in upper level logic, like mathematical logic, set theory, topology, and so on. The reason is that these topics are highly abstract, but in the process of doing proofs, you will learn how to think more precisely and clearly.

Also, your most productive education is often created outside of class. Try very hard to find a professor (or two) who cares about you as a learner, not just as another number in the gradebook. Go to office hours as much as he or she will let you!

Lastly: resources like Open Courseware are worth their bytecount in barrels of oil. Don't leave them unused, especially if a traditional education is out of your grasp for the time being.

Good luck, math is amazing.
Expected Return - How long should you wait for an Elevator?
How is Father's Day any more relevant to Hackers than it is to the rest of society? If no more relevant (as I suspect), then reminders such as this seem off-topic for HN.
LicketyShip: Founding CEO Out, Ditches Business Model To Focus On Couriers As A Web Service
It increases the sense of community. And from the title it is easy to avoid if you don't want to waste your time.
Enable word-wrapping on code snippets, and other weird "stretch out the page" behavior. Example:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=214975
Don't be a sourpuss.
I do. I used to consider it a necessary evil - I hated unit testing, but I hated not unit testing more. But then I started using the green bar as my first indication that the code works. Everybody likes seeing their code work, so naturally I liked seeing the green bar. I'd just write a test and have it pass instead of running the program.

(Naturally, I'd run the program afterwards to make sure it really worked - but if it didn't, I could just consider that a bug in the tests, write the test, fix the code, and close the bug. Everybody likes closing bugs, so there's the reward...)

Doctest is great too, since it's pretty common to use the Python interpreter as the first indication that your code works. Then you just paste the session transcript into the docstring, and you're done.
Hang on what green bar are you talking about? is that a feature of your IDE or something?
It is of interest to me, it's just a minor technical mistake that has no relevance whatsoever to the overall article, and is therefore nitpicking.
Your right, but dammit I think I'm just too damn lazy to write and test unit tests. I think that's my main problem...I'm lazy :-)
The problem with Sharepoint from my point of view is that it is too slow. The Document Management Part is very nice but only effectively useable with the Internet Explrer. So for a MS Shop it can be a very nice tool in smaller companies or a startup I would use a Multiblog System and/or Wiki to discuss and as knowledge base.
Nope. Hate unit testing. Never do it. Makes me more invested in my existing code so I'm less likely to throw out previous versions.
Another option... make karma be worth nothing tangible whatsoever. Make people have to go out of their way to see how much karma another member has.

Oh wait... that's all covered. Karma is stupid, and nobody really cares except for when these dumb posts come up a couple times a month.
Activerecord sucks, but it doesn't matter
I hated unit testing until I learned this practice:

http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/testfirst.html

Since then I really enjoy writing unit tests. It really changed my mindset. Unit testing is more about design rather than testing itself.
Unit testing written first actually forces you to throw away bad code more often. The test is independent from the production code.
Lastly: resources like Open Courseware are worth their bytecount in barrels of oil. Don't leave them unused, especially if a traditional education is out of your grasp for the time being.

For that price you could just buy MIT :-)