skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Or, they may look at the startup world as a closed gig for insiders only, and not realise that all you need to do to get in the game is to start playing (and play your hardest, but i digress).

The ad makes it clear that there are people who will be willing to help you in if they think you've got what it takes, so that it's clearly not as closed as it might seem otherwise.
Advice for a new startup idea needed!
Hi Guys

I was looking for some hacker oriented advice. Currently I have been working as CEO for our travel social networking site OFF2.COM, due to launch in just under 6 weeks I am really excited for the upcoming developments. I have however been working on the project solely for 14 months now and have a great idea I have been toying around with for the last month or so which i really want to get my teeth into. I have the business knowledge and experience in creating a startup but...

The problem is... I am not a hacker, I have a very good understanding of the technologies involved to create a killer site but simply have not gone down the route of taking my coding skills to the next level.

At present I cannot personally fund this project and in order to get to demo phase need to bring a hacker on board to work in partnership, what resources or methods would anyone suggest in trying to attract a hacker on an equity only option at present?,

Any advice would be great guys

Cheers
I think it depends on the position and responsibilities the person will have once hired. If the programmer will be coding directly from specs without any room for "interpretation" then a coding challenge may be very applicable. If you are looking for a programmer that also understands your business and will be required to make decisions and think on their feet, the value of a coding challenge diminishes.

It also depends on the time frame of the position. If you are looking to hire a programmer on a per project basis, then a solid understanding of the development language is critical. However, if you are hiring an developer for the long term, it's better to hire a smart and agile person that can contribute to the overall business as well -- which is hard to measure from a coding challenge.
So very true. I think experience gives you the knowledge to recognise when something can be done better because without it you just think that this is the norm and how things are. Throw in a dash of frustration just before "there must be a better way" and you have yourself an idea with determination behind it which is going to solve that problem.

I always have a bunch of paper in my back pocket for writing stuff down on the spur of the moment and then I develop the idea as a mind-map, sleep on it, and then develop it some more.
A good friend of my father's reminisced about how when I was 6-7, I would show him my notebooks full of perpetual motion machines.
Ask YC: Learning to read code?
I'm a high schooler who has worked on a few small projects of my own. Recently I've started to work with a friend[1] and I've discovered that reading code really is an order of magnitude harder than writing it. What's the best way to learn to read code? If the solution is just "read a lot of code", do you have any suggestions for reading material?

--

[1] pg is right about cofounders. At least for some people, including me.
Ah thanks for that.
Interesting. This thing seems to have been voted up, then voted down. I wonder if some people have an instant strong dislike of this idea?
JS-Kit Scores Deal With WorldNow, Adds 19 Million Potential Users
Well, there are function points/LOC. I guess you don't want to go only on voting records either. But they are important. Unquantifiables are important too.
I think you have to be realistic about HOW LONG you will be carrying a laptop on your shoulder before you take a break. 10 minutes? Half an hour? 3 hours? Realistically? A 'standard' notebook is no problem to carry in a shoulder strap bag for up to an hour at a time I'd say. Any more (like my recent siteseeing trip around London and you'll wish you had an Air. I certainly did! Most people go for only a relatively short distance before sitting.
You have to remember that ZYB started a couple of years ago.
They're a necessity. For the simple reason that too many people lie on their CV, no matter how good their CV looks you have no-idea how much of it is accurate.

Obviously there are cases where you wouldn't use it, but generally they only apply when you know someone's capable of coding anyway (i.e. due to an indisputable reputation, experience working with them, etc.).

However as a predictive measure it's fairly limited in that it's a binary indicator. If someone fails then there's a fair chance they're a terrible developer, if someone passes there's a fair chance they're not a terrible developer.
I'd be curious if you posted this comment over at HBS (although Umair has been known to lurk here)...

What you're missing is that "administration" as you're grokking it is optimized for industrial economics, not the low cost, low risk, high speed world of networks (globalization, mobile phones, etc).

Also suggest that you go back and read the previous article on "Hacking Detroit" with a keen eye on the "auto making platform" strategy.

To borrow a meme from today's Venture Hacks:

"Bug Labs for cars"

BOING!
Hardware interrupt.
This classic started me seriously thinking about software, safety, and rigorous design.
Is the Bob Morris he references rtm's dad?
What does this language let me do that I can't do more easily / robustly in another language?

To elaborate, does it allow for niftiness that I couldn't do with a solid scheme or haskell environment, or does it beat out python or perl for quick scripting in some domain?
Do you have a favorite open source project? Download the source and try to build the runtime files yourself. Then you have an environment to poke through the code and play with.
for example, do you like Python? download the source and create a debug build of it.

Another thing to do is to go to code samples online at the example sites. Type them in and/or download them and play with them.

Yet another thing to try is to do a port of a program to another platform. Even if you are not successful, you should learn a lot.

The key is to take more than one approach, as there is no one right way, there is not one true path. Immerse yourself in different programming activities. The important part is practice, practice, practice, like the story on going to Carnegie Hall.

Me? One of my earliest bigger projects was porting an old star trek game written in Altair basic to Apple Basic. I had only mimeographed printouts published in a book of computer games back in the 1970's. Arrays were not handled the same between the two versions of basic, so I had to come up with a different array scheme than was in the book.
If you've got the entrepreneurial itch, even an army of Paul Grahams shouting "NO" at you won't stop you from trying again :-) (though it might provide an interesting basis for a startup idea... imagine you had an army of PG's with their attention focused on you - can you make something out of that?)
Evolutionary Database Design Tools
He's using "hack" as a management/strategy heuristic.

You may find that his articles "lack substance" because Umair generally works within a kind of Socratic method that demands more of the reader than spoonfed pedantry like TechCrunch, et al.

PG has said a lot of this implicitly or explicitly in his essays.
Add me to the "never uses switch statements" list. I've never seen the point in learning the syntax in any of the languages I know, since a bunch of else ifs (or elseifs, or elsifs, or elifs, depending on the language) does the same thing. If I waste a few keystrokes, but save a few brain cells, I think it's a worthwhile bargain.

Of course if I had to write that kind of construction often I'd probably learn the syntax of the case statement, but in the kind of work I do it hardly ever actually comes up.
Apture - Interesting way to add content to web pages
Realize the idea itself is worth nothing, and the value you're offering for your share of the equity is your experience and skills

You need to find someone passionate about the idea, so post it publically to maximize your chance of finding them. Success is all about execution and not ideas. Don't worry about someone stealing your idea.

Be clear on what you can bring to the project, show of your experience. Show your experience at attracting vc/angel funding, show how your network can bring success to this new idea.
In some places the message is "Leave". Leave this grody little town. I think it's been the message of Detroit.

Jerusalem, where I live, has a message, "Pray". The biggest industry in Jerusalem is the Israeli government (analogous to DC). The second biggest is tourism. The Arabs and the Jews actually quit fighting and cooperate in business to sell trinkets to the tourists.

So the other messages of Jerusalem are "Survive", "Fight", "Sell", and actually, "Leave". A lot of the Israelis are moving to Tel Aviv for business/employment reasons. But apartments are hard to get in Jerusalem because the religious rich keep on buying up the snazziest spots. There are a lot of very expensive apartments that are used maybe half the year. So another message is "Visit". And people do. If you're into real estate, the message is "Build Luxury". The luxury apartments are crowding out the poor.

The only ambitious people I've met in Jerusalem are the newly arrived, and some business folk. Actually, the Torah Scholars are very ambitious in a way that is about academics but also about power. They want to master their subject, but also want their religiosity to change history through a sort of Divine Intervention. That's pretty ambitious.

The reason you saw TV's was because the kids were watching. Mom and Dad were online working or studying. Were the offices of Via Web lined with dead-tree books up to the ceiling?

And the books you saw in Cambridge might have been from decades past, but the scholars in the residences might have been online. Even sociology is hard.
read a book on the language your code is written in. write some codes, starting with really simple stuff and keep pushing yourself to hard stuff.
That's the origin of power and wealth in bg - very, very sad!
write tests for the code to learn about how to use it. just write what you guess should work, then see if it passes.

if there are already tests, try reading those.
It's more complex than that. I don't know the details of this instance (Link is down), but the bittorrent protocol is pretty bad - you can just add any IPs you wish into a swarm and say they are sharing particular files. So launching DDOS attacks is pretty simple. There is also no easy way to trace back who injected those IP addresses into the system.
Reminds me of Hockey
Good advice, Currently I have experience in raising seed funding for our current project from Angel Investors. I am confident that if I can bring my skills of project managemetn, my network of outsourcing and business/sales contacts then I feel I certainly add value to the project and its execution.
Going back to your point and relative to mine earlier, where would you look to publish this idea and proposition publically? Any potential forums / sites / colleges that spring to mind?
Here are two code nomics you might enjoy:

http://nomic.info/perlnomic/
http://groups.google.com/group/ecmanomic/web/getting-started
This is true under US copyright law, and in those nations with harmonized laws. The site could be hosted somewhere else, which might still give rise to infringement in the US but as no one in Outer Nowhere will care it doesn't really matter.

In addition a US (etc) website might require copyright assignment as part of the terms of service. This is possibly enforceable as a contract because there is clearly consideration on both sides (comment content, publishing service). The law says that consideration must be sufficient but not necessarily equal.

Of course the biggest reason that the terms of service would work is that if someone really wanted to challenge them they would have to take the site owner to court, and who does that over blog comments? Possession is nine tenths of the law :)
Administration, ie. administration by a bankruptcy court, which is the pressing issue facing Detroit carmakers, rather than mobile phones or whatever.

There isn't anything new in the auto industry. Hybrids are typically laughable. Diesel electric power systems (that is, "hybrids") are basically what replaced the steam age. Everything else is marketing.
Ask YC: Your Favorite EV-DO provider? (specific to New York City & Eastern Long Island/Montauk area)
I'm considering buying an EV-DO modem so that I can work while traveling to New York: specifically Manhattan and then Montauk, Long Island. Anyone have experiences with which provider has best QoS & bandwidth out there? Verizon? Sprint? Thanks!
I can't log in again after having logged out. If I am putting in the wrong password it is not notifying me in anyway. It just takes me back to the public timeline. There is no way to retrieve the password.
You are correct -- the insight is what matters. But in this case, I do not think the patronage analogy is helping.

Giles brings up patronage as an explanation for why VCs -- who are otherwise interested in money -- are not interested in hearing about a profitable microloan business. From the patronage analogy he gathers that they are more interested in power than money, hence their class hierarchy and why microloans are beneath them.

I feel the patronage analogy misses the point because it implies that VCs are somehow not interested in profit. If you follow this logic through, you'd conclude that startups are profit-losing ventures kept alive only for the power trips of VCs. While this may be true in a few cases, I think it is an incorrect conclusion, since VCs are interested in profit (or, at least, their investors are), and there is apparently enough return in startups that investors do not go elsewhere.

There is a simpler explanation for why VCs are not interested in microloans: it is far enough out of their geographic and technical areas that they don't think they could do very well at it.
We've been using these for about a month at Justin.tv. They are awesome. Capacity increased from about 350mbps per m1.x-large instance to nearly 700mbps per c1.x-large instance.
YouTube not such a money sinkhole after all?
There's actually two separate skills here. One is learning to just read code, as in, understanding what the code is saying. The second is understanding the code, which would be what the code is doing.

Learning to just read the code requires writing alot in that particular language (I find writing teaches you alot more than reading). When some piece of code uses some aspect of a language in a way you don't understand, go figure out what they are doing, internalize that concept, and go write some code yourself that uses that same concept in that language.

In my experience, writing alot of code is the best way to learn to read it. You'll discover and truly understand why certain things are done certain ways once you've had to go through the pain of doing it any other way. One of the 'first' examples you might run into is how every single header file in a c/c++ library seems to start with an #ifdef/#define combo, and end with an #endif. It might seem a bit bewildering at first. But when you run into your first case of multiple includes of the same file, you'll quickly see why they do it.

As for actually 'understanding' a big pile of code, that's more difficult. This is where you understand the language just fine but you need to try to wrap your mind a giant pile of someone else's code. You have to immerse yourself in their codebase, figure out where all the important files are, and so on. Take it small chunks. Pick a feature, trace the code, put in print statements, etc. And you -really- need a way of quickly navigating the code (jumping to decelerations, switching between header/source, etc). Many IDEs provide some level of functionality to do this. Personally, I use emacs and etags.
Can you see how the argument you're making proves his point?
If you have been working on one project, drive it to completion firt. You do a diservice to everyone if you are the acting CEO of Off2.com to get focused on another product before you have even brought the one you are working on to market. Focus on your current work, that if successful should provide you the funds to fuel other projects later. At least that would be my advice.
reminds me of Flux
Computer trained to "read" mind images of words
Why convert the Java app into a browser-based AJAX form when you can launch the application using Java Web Start?
I too like sigils for two reasons:
1) Makes str interpolation (as you mentioned) easier on the eyes.

2) I like to see, at a glance, what a variable "is doing". In Broccoli, there are only two "doings" hold values, or holding a collection of values.

3) I know I said 2, but the real reason.... it is easier to parse. ;)

-m
Don't patronise me. I put plenty of my own in while reading this article. I'm familiar with many usages of the word "hack".

The first thing I did as I started reading this article was share it on Google Reader. I was obviously putting plenty in.

Then, after I got to the end, I removed the article from my Google Reader, for the simple reason that this article doesn't just require you to put something in - it requires you to put the entire substance in.

There is no discernible pattern in what it describes as "hack". "Hack", going by this article, is anything that the author (and the reader) consider good and that was done in the last 10 years. So effectively, it means "good change". It provides no pattern which could be used to help generate more of those hacks, however.

The best way to expose this is to summarise the article.

The summary is: "Cool stuff, wow, please do more."

Now, I have nothing against an article which conveys that message - but it needs to do so honestly. This article pretends to be presenting a good idea, when in fact it is completely idea-free.

This is my opinion and you may of course disagree, but please formulate that disagreement with fewer TechCrunch innuendos and other patronising devices.

Also, if you disagree, it'd be good to hear what ideas you think Umair actually puts forward in this essay.
The latter. As it stands, it is no better than a 1000 different languages out there. I will readily admit that.

I personally have a difficult time wrapping my head around ideas like, functional, and closures, and lambda, in the abstract, so this is my way (not there yet BTW) of really wrapping my head around these ideas.
Tracking Google Analytics goals with no distinct associated pageview
FCC considers offering spectrum for free wireless Internet
Microsoft:  What we got here is a failure to communicate
Revision3 Sends FBI after MediaDefender
I can't speak for Haskell, as I know very little (read: nothing) about it. As for Scheme, it does nothing that Scheme couldn't do.
How can I better motivate people to constribute chat rules in the Chatbot Game?
3 simple steps for any company to protect its reputation online [partly covered in the article]:

1. If you must be stupid or evil, pick ONE. Don't try to be both or you will (eventually) get burned.

2. If you get caught, 'fess up, apologize, make it right, and then stop being stupid and evil.

3. Don't sue the little guy, unless the fact that he's bad and wrong is immediately obvious to a jury of millions.
I think the main issue is that they may not find the bot particularly impressive as is and just leave.

They don't consider the potential of wisdom of the crowds in creating a compelling chatbot.

They may also not consider that contributing chat rules and seeing how well they do in practice is fun.

As an additional motivation, I will probably add the capability to personalize the bot's chatting to your site so that embedding it in your site makes more sense.
It is very different than arc (read: less powerful) as it is not really a functional language, has no concept of anonymous functions (although that would be easy enough to add), has no closure, has no continuations, and has no macro facility. The only thing that I have taken from arc is the naming of the defun function.
I appreciate your point, I seem to have so much spare time and energy that while I am young (27 isnt too old!!!) I want to be able to deliver the ideas I have.

My personal role is to bring the product to the market and create the business relationships and on budget/time, this has been acheived. I suppose I want to utilize the energy and time I have while I have it!! ;)
Hollywood Pitch: Feedburner for iPhones
We're all guinea pigs in Google's search experiment
Comcast’s DNS records hijacked, redirect to hacked page
Jerry and Steve Play Golf Together (Meanwhile...Yahoo Begs For Offer)
Instant Marketing Materials with BrandDoozie
Taste Tripping Party
Rumor at D6: Revver Founder Selling Stealth Startup Digisynd To Disney
Try stepping through the code in an interactive debugger. I typically run a gdb-style debugger under Emacs, but anything which lets you step through code and inspect data works well.

Some people really loathe these tools, but I think they're invaluable when someone drops a pile of spaghetti code in your lap and tells you to support it. Figure out the entry point to the code, set a breakpoint in main() or something like that, and start stepping. After ploughing through a few of the code's basic transactions, you should have a sense for the data structures and abstractions it relies on, if any. Then, you should be able to read individual functions and such to get the gritty details. The use of threads substantially complicates the picture, of course.
One of the first YC startups did exactly this. I'm not sure what happened to it.
http://www.thinkature.com/ ?
That wouldn't be consistent over time. The EC2 Compute Units represent the power of a certain type of CPU at a certain point in time. Performance for a given clock speed has increased dramatically over the past few years. If you have a suggestion for something better, I can definitely pass it along to the EC2 team.
I'm sure they dreamed of a bright future where 1 Mhz, even 100 Mhz, machines were common.
I don't find reading well-written code any more difficult than reading a math book. But of course it is an order of magnitude harder than reading prose. You have to force yourself to slow down and understand what each part is saying. As opposed to ordinary text, every word is important, and you need to know what it's doing there.

Some of this is just proficiency in the specific language, but it's more about the concepts and idioms of programming in general. I've fixed a bug in an open source python project, and I couldn't write a "Hello World" program in python without a reference.

But do note that "well-written" is mandatory. If the code isn't well-written, it will take you a lot longer to figure out. The code I wrote in high school was pretty bad.

Variables should be named to describe what they represent. You should have a reasonable number of comments, not too many or too few (ironically, this amount changes as you get better). Divide your code into manageable chunks and split them into subroutines. Within subroutines, separate the chunks with at least one blank line.
PHP isn't Thread-Safe - It just pretends to be