skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd like to apply, but i don't want to apply as a sole founder. Is anyone else in the same position? Shoot me a message, maybe we can work something out.
The machine that copies itself
I think his point is that only Yahoo and Google get the tools, and he's singling out Google as having the clout that's required to force Adobe to make them available for all the search engines. Because they're big and they're big on Net Neutrality.
Why Microsoft will win Yahoo and Google is not the greatest tech company
I started writing something similar: I think the real reason most people don't like Lisp is because most people don't like to think in s-expressions. (Then I thought nah, nobody's going to like that, so I deleted it and just left the bit about libraries - foolish move!)

It's not only fear or laziness; I know two very good programmers who have tried Lisp and don't like it. Interestingly, both are Smalltalkers, though one was of the original generation that migrated to Java.

I wonder if it's that some people like thinking in trees and some don't. Human language has barely any nesting. Putting one parenthetical phrase inside another is already rare and that's just two levels. Parenthetical nesting is so difficult for humans to process that there's even a well-known hypnotic induction based on it (that essentially creates a stack overflow in a person's brain).

One of the guys I'm talking about has a programming style that's markedly linear (though not procedural). He likes chaining expressions together almost like noun phrases in English. For example, where in Lisp you'd write

(min y (max x 0))

he might write:

x.atLeast(0).atMost(y)

It's a trivial example, but enough to imagine more complex ones. The difference is dramatic if you think of a tree with many levels and the comparable unwound form. Of course, not all trees can be unwound in this way.

The converse is true, though: all chains of this form could be converted to s-expressions, so it's easy to imagine embedding this style into Lisp with a macro. That's the sort of thing that gets talked about naively, but never catches on. I think it would be a losing proposition. You'd lose Lisp's regularity, which is one of its greatest advantages. And the resulting programs would still have plenty of s-expressions, so you'd end up driving away the same group of people after all.
collegeotr writes trash about other college newspapers.
Yeah, I thought that "award-winning" bit was at best superfluous, and the article overall in typical ddj style. I don't care for their style in general: "too corporate" is a short way to phrase it, but I think my dislike goes deeper than that, even if I can't put my finger exactly on whatever it is that irks me.

But, to be fair, they did mention hg and git, albeit in passing.
To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.

- Leonard Bernstein
Well the idea of a usability problem that is never found sounds pretty metaphysical to me. I mean - if no one actually experience the problem, then how is it a problem? Also, how can a problem experienced by a user be a false positive?

Nielsen just claims that if you test with 15 users, you can be pretty sure you have found all problems you will ever find - you most likely won't find any new problems by using an additional 15 or 50 tests. (But obviously you cannot be 100% sure.)

But whether his numbers are based on sound research I wont judge.
Mac 101: Capture sharp screenshots
Could be a little more sneaky though, i.e. give a little box in the end to "explain" answering yes or instead of 1 yes/no drop down, make 1 drop down for each choice. Also couldn't hurt to throw some irrelevant yes/no questions to hide the questions that matter, something like "Do you own pets?" or "Do you use dialup?"

As it is now, if you have a clue you can probably figure out that answering yes is pretty much an instant disqualification, since the system will never know if you are answering yes to only 1 founder(probably seems like no big deal to most people) or yes to none of the founders are programmers.
I thought about this idea for awhile after reading Link, but it would be very to theorize unless I had access to data for a huge social network.

And it's not just the most influential, but you can further break it down to by finding who are the early adopters, connectors, and evangelist of the group. This I think would be the holy grail for any advertiser.
PDF is an open spec. Adobe's viewer sucking is a separate issue.
Answering yes doesn't mean instant disqualification. We've funded startups despite all of those. A yes just reminds us to take a second look to see if there are problems.
John McAfee's Flying Circus Wants You
Show off your design skills. Great developers are always looking to pair up with great designers.
Between getting into and becoming truly adept is a giant chasm.

If you have a talent for design, step it up several notches. Great talent will seek you out.
Sorry, I was merely given an OSX machine at work. Apparently 10.5 didn't refresh xcode, or something. I don't know the details -- this particular layer isn't something I focus my efforts on.

I also recall that several piece of software just failed to install completely. Twisted web and the Divmod stack, for example. And multicore usage wasn't really very good compared with Ubuntu. And the macbook kept seizing up at random, a few times a week.

My overall impression was 'this isn't better than Ubuntu.' Maybe I just got a bad start? I wouldn't mind trying it again, but if I had to install something from scratch, I'd use Ubuntu.
Pencil Turns Firefox into a Drawing Tool
The Internet Hammer and the everything Nail
My OS X screenshots with both cmd-shift-3 and cmd-shift-4 have always defaulted to PNG out of the box. I've been on board since Tiger and on two different machines.
You are approaching this as a hacker, you know your stuff. Chances are you can build a _____ clone in a weekend. While in that same time the non-hacker who is trying to learn, will achieve at most a hello world application.

Lets face it, the web moves very fast, if you take an extra month to roll out, you increase the chances that another competitor will get into your space and will eat up all the market share, way before you even get your product launched.

Ideas are not unique, if you have an idea chances are a hundred other people are already working on that same idea.

So between hiring someone and having a product out in 3 months, and doing it yourself and learning and having it out in a year(if that)...I'd go with 3 months, each and every time. Nothing is stopping you from learning that same code while your app is being built by someone else.

Should you know how to read code? Absolutely, but it takes that much less effort to learn how to read code, compared to writing it and figuring out the hundreds of different technologies.

Lets face it, most of the stuff on the internet is not that innovative. Usually its just a mashup of existing tech/ideas...if that. So you really aren't giving away any state secrets to the people you outsource to. And as long as the company is in USA you have plenty of legal ammunition to prevent them from stealing your ideas.

And maybe outsourcing your business is nuts, but at least when you outsource you have the option of actually getting your business off the ground. Instead of destining it to failure because you really didn't know what you were doing.

As far as having a clue when something goes wrong, once again you are approaching this as a hacker. You know what to look for when code crashes.

An amateur would be much more happier to call/email his development company and have them fix the problem, instead of reading through thousands lines of code to see what could it be, that went wrong.

You do have something with technical talent, but you can always bullshit your way through that, by either hiring a recruitment company or having a few hackers recommend you some people.
so how do you know if the person picked yes because its a single founder or if he picked yes because none of the founders are programmers?

I would at least add a text box for them to tell you, what it is they are answering yes to. Would save you that one phone call/email to ask that question.
Geek Army
Same here, and my screenshots have never been blurry, either. I have no idea where the author got the info that "by default the screen-shoot format is a made as a jpeg set to resolution 60".
http://www.willarson.com/code/sparklines/sparklines.html

This library seems more feature-full. It works in Safari.
I really love Skitch for taking screenshots.

You can go from snapping a shot to having it on the web and pasting a URL to a field in like 5 seconds. Like such:

http://skitch.com/bprater/xri2/hacker-news-mac-101-capture-s...
Similar position, but here's the thing:

How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the founders not met in person?

I think "cofounder" is in the same zone as "wife" in terms of trust required.

Would someone with experience in the area comment on the merits of "marriages of convenience" in the cofounding of startups?

When I asked jl at startupschool where most people met their cofounders, she said friends at school.
Announcing Tech.NewsJunk.Com
Have you seen consultants from overseas in an internal IT dept? I think this is total ____, and it sounds like another PR ploy to lobby a raise for the visa quota. I work for one of the investment banks, and I would say a low ball estimate is 25%-30% of the back office IT, is visa related individuals in the US (either consultants or internal hires), not to mention the "24 hour" teams they like to implement with India. I don't have a problem with companies needing to import talent at all, but I do have a problem with companies driving the wages down by using these excuses of a lack of talent. Subsequently, paying these people below US market value. If a shortage was the case, companies should pay a premium of something in the ballpark of 10% more, because of the "lack" of demand. Instead, they look at this as a cost saving tool. It's so blatant, and its so obvious, just work in the back office of Wall St. for a month, and you will agree. I wonder what it's like on the west coast.
I'm using Firefox 3 and that web page is broke.
Coincidentally, I just saw this a few days ago for the first time. Definitely worth a Netflix/Blockbuster/whatever if you haven't seen it - the story is surprisingly complex for a 1920's movie.
yeah, don't take me to say, "let's join forces." i meant to say, "let's talk." no commitment, no guarantees, no certain outcomes. but, based on the fact that we're all here, i hope we just might have enough in common to make something interesting happen. (raise your hand if you don't like it when interesting things happen.)
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Anyone succeeded in making one of these? It looks like they sell a lot of the stuff you would need but are you SOL if you don't know anyone who has one to replicate the custom plastic parts?

http://dev.www.reprap.org/bin/view/Main/PartsSupplies
The problem with Twitter is that it's centralized. It's silly to get locked into a vendor and then be surprised when they can't meet your needs. Blogs aren't all hosted by one startup and neither should microblogs.
Unless they've omitted something or lied it should be clear from the rest of the app why they're picking yes.
I can't imagine such a service having good growth...
Apple + Nike will no doubt provide this.
Our Paradoxical Attitudes Toward Privacy
> The figures point to the brutal reality behind technology companies’ complaints that universities are not tailoring their computer science degrees sufficiently to meet business needs.

This is idiocy. Computer science has as much to do with their business needs as pharmacists have to do with biology. That's why biologists have figured out how to make separate programs for them.
yep. I would vote the main article down for being inaccurate if I could.
thanks. i remember trying to get a hold of the PCI standard a few years ago. there went my little hardware interface project ;_;
Emphasis on mostly. I'm just speaking from my personal experience with friends who are marines that describe the Battle of Fallujah as the best video game ever. Don't get me wrong, I respect those who serve in the military. I could never do what you do.
M is also worth seeing. I suppose it was the first serial killer movie, as well as Peter Lorre's screen debut. It's different from modern movies insofar as the serial killer is rather pathetic. But the film itself is haunting and is drenched in that marvelous 1920s German expressionist look and feel.

Edit: not Lorre's screen debut, but his second appearance, as I just found out from this superb piece: http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_4.4/leming_printable.htm.
It's easy, friend. Two reasons:

a) most people simply don't care. period. IE6 (or whatever the OS opens when they double-click "internet") will let them read news or check email.
b) Their Large Corporation, Inc., has a policy against open source, and they don't have admin privileges anyway.
The silent market crash (S&P 500 against the price of eggs)
Early insights from the Top 100 Australian Web2 Applications list
I should point out that the article is incorrect. Namely, PDF is a complete superset of PS. Furthermore, it is capable of supporting non-printer specific properties like digital signatures and even external files and animation, none of which are supported by PS. (And before you say that animation is useless, imagine using PDF for presentations). Try reading the PDF 1.6 standard sometime (its dry like all standards but it gives a demonstration of what PDF is capable of).
s/page/table
I gave the link on my blog. Anyhow, here is the link again (with a few additional links)
1. http://www.solucija.com/home/css-templates/
2. http://www.freecsstemplates.org/
3. http://www.free-css-templates.com/
4. Just google 'free css templates' or 'free web app templates'
For all those applying, I have some advice: I live well. I live very well, and all I do is sell software online. I got rich the moment I stopped chasing the startup dream.

I used to think that I could become a millionare by having one big software hit that would get bought by Microsoft and I'd never have to work on it again.

After a series of disappointments, I decided to stop chasing this dream, and instead just sell software online. Now I work very little, and I work on things I enjoy doing, and I earn way more money monthly than I can spend.

I'm pointing out that you don't need to create a calender widget or some time monitoring software to become rich. You can also just make a normal product that people want (for example Tax entry software), and sell it for a price that people are willing to pay ($300), and you'll make good money.

Play the lottery, but don't give up your entire life in the hope of a better life.
Umm.. Thanks for pointing out! Fixed that on my post. :)
I dunno -- a few people here are tired of this kind of post, and I understand why: we seem them a lot.

But some of us need a regular asskick. So we don't mind as much.
From section 5 of the "Signs that you shouldn't be a programmer" section:

Your program produces output to be read by another (eg: a browser), or implements a network protocol, and relies on the other party's software to be significantly tolerant to spec violations.

Doesn't this describe most web applications?
:) YC is an idea that is hard to scale.
Sure, but the whole point of using a higher level language is to use some of those higher level features. It seems somewhat... unfair to argue that C++ "can be fast" so long as you basically restrict it to its C subsets.

I want the code to be both high level and fast. A language is of no use to me as a performance target if in order to get performance with it you have to use a tony subset of it.

Sure, every language has fast and slow ways of doing things
Save the Arecibo Radio Telescope: Wire Washington
Google Ordered to Turn Over YouTube Viewer Data to Vaicom
Planning Your Wedding and Honeymoon
Detailed wedding planning advice for the ceremony, reception, and honeymoon
To anyone on the fence about applying, I suggest going for it- after interviewing with the folks at Y Combinator I walked way incredibly impressed with each and every one of them, from the intellect brought to the conversation to their flexibility with the odd circumstances we brought to the interview.

All of the YC founders I've met speak highly of their experience and wouldn't trade it for the world- with every founder I've met and asked if they found it was worthwhile, the answer was an unequivocal yes. Give it a go and see what happens, the worst that can happen is you're no worse off than you are today.
NONONONO! Please do not bother with a "Rent a coder" route.

Find a coding partner who will partner you.

If you truly have a great idea and the drive, you will be able to find the right person.

Most of the "business" people who whine about not being able to find the right partners are the ones with the terrible ideas and lack of drive.

M
Why Start-Up Leadership Isn't For Everyone
This is from Earth Class Mail, the start-up whose initial journey was featured in the show "Start-up Junkies." This particular blog post hits on some points about startups that are far more critical to long-term success of any start-up than the average media ever gets close to uncovering.
Now you're confusing an 80 year old man with all 'basic' users.
Most programmers I've known learn whatever languages they're taught in school and then learn new languages are required by their jobs. So even if a "median programmer" is terrified by Lisp, if they work somewhere that uses Lisp and have to learn it, then they will. I introduced Python to my workplace simply by using it on a project for which it was the best choice, which forced some of my co-workers to later start learning it.

Thus, the lack of a batteries-included Lisp might well be more significant than a fear of s-expressions. Hopefully Arc will one day reach the point where I can sneak it into my workplace as I have done for Python. At that point the fear of s-expressions will hopefully be irrelevant.
This junk crashed my firefox.
I personally have had the pleasure of watching the 1980's cut, it can be fetched for a pretty penny on eBay. It's highly worth it.
In any form, taxation without representation is tyranny.
agreed. there are no lack of great hackers looking for great partners. most people misunderstand their own lack of tenacity and good ideas for lack of good hackers
Google Changes its Home Page
Google the giant search engine changed its home page after it had declined to make any change to its home page.
If anything, this article paints a rosier picture than reality. The Yahoos who think current management has any clue could fit into a telephone booth. There are Yahoos who have faith that Yahoo is indestructible, due to its sheer size and still-mighty audience share. But that optimism doesn't come from faith in the executives.

Top execs complain it's hard to get stuff done at every company. In reality, Yahoo's internal regrouping around the Y!OS strategy is fast and pretty bold. The problem isn't that Yahoo is making slow decisions, it's that Yahoo is making stupid decisions. Corporate politicians and intellectual frauds are defeating the creative and competent people.
They used to default to PDFs. And it could have been jpegs before that, maybe back in 10.0, I don't know.
Ping.fm: Update all of your social networks at once
Hello: Don't change the design
Why poopoo an idea instead of making creative suggestions?

God, who needed another search engine when Google fired up it's first server?

There are ideas, and then there are gold inside ideas. Some ideas just need time to ferment and geniuses to put the right combination of elements together.

This is why I rarely tell others about ideas I intend to implement.
The reality is that folks who work at the level discussed in the document probably don't have the desire to actually read the article and improve themselves.
If you are a Y!Hacker that is waiting in line, good luck! Should make for a fun story in 20 years!
Which version of firefox, what is your connection speed and which slideshow were you trying to watch?
uh. the 900 MHz version isn't sold out already, it just hasn't made it to the store yet -- unfortunately the store uses qty: 0 to mean sold out.
I've been sticking with 2 as a way of forcing myself to be careful about writing performant code. That way the app I'm writing has a better chance of being fast in the next generation of browsers. This is important. I could of course just use 2 for testing, but I find that doesn't have quite the same psychological effect.
Yeah man, as long as you have fun doing this Mac blogging, its worth it.

I hate Mac personally, but am happy to see you are willing to give the community the fullest. Love what you do!
http://annotations.diariolinux.com/
I think the author is referring to programmers who produce "semi-correct" HTML, only test in 1 browser (if they test at all) and expect everything to be acceptable.

As a separate example, I know our customers expect the CSV files that they generate for our program to run to work despite ambiguous data, incorrect / inconsistent number of fields, spelling mistakes, etc...
On Day Care, Google Makes a Rare Fumble
Programming in C is maybe a little bit like murdering chickens.
Programmers don't produce HTML, that job is left to high school dropouts who aren't tough enough to work at Kwik Lube.

Real programmers write binary code using aluminum keyboards with just three buttons: 0, 1 and "Enter".
Learn, programming is not rocket science, it is easy as you go along. There are tons of good people and documentation to hold your hand as you go along. You can only learn swimming by jumping in the water, So Just Jump.
Probably Debian, most serious hackers are all on Debian - what else can it possibly be?

I seriously doubt he's running Windows on a Mac...
I really wonder how this can happen in the UK. Here in Switzerland it's the opposite. We have only like 300-400 people a year graduating with a CS degree and 2-3k jobs open. It's a real crisis, and companies are outsourcing to anywhere. Not to save costs, but because they simply can't find people.
In my school ETH Zurich, in 2000 there were over 300 people starting CS, this year it was less than 100.
I think salaries just have to continue raising until they meet bankers so that engineering and CS starts getting attractive again...
My best first hand impression of the story's professionalism was when I saw http://img361.imageshack.us/img361/3332/brilliantpe1.png "Microsoft (GOOG, Fortune 500)"
Looking at Alexa's top 50, Flickr seems to be one of the few web 2.0 companies up there. I'm disqualifying Wordpress.com because of the mass amount of blogs hosted there, which if is considered web 2.0 then Blogger would have to be included as well.
The most hardcore definition of 'real programmers' that I've ever read ;)
Software Development Meme (go for the long version)
heh

"we got a problem here, uh yeah, the website is down"

http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/
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Geoffrey Grosenbach has a Ruby library for generating Sparklines: http://nubyonrails.com/articles/2005/07/28/sparklines-graph-...

And, as usual, Why the Lucky Stiff has a wacky minimalist one: http://redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/sparklinesForMinimalists....
Apple Files Multi-touch Gesture Patent for iPhone 3G
Apple has filed a patent for a “Multi-touch Gesture Dictionary,” an invention (US Patent 20070177803) that introduces the notion of chords. According to Apple, the gesture dictionary can include a plurality of entries, each corresponding to a particular chord.