skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've gotten INFP, INTP in the past and INTJ (today). Silly thing can't even keep its story straight.
I use a small spiral-bound notebook. I've thought about moving to a software version but I find the physical act of writing to be crucial to the process.

For a software to work for me, it would need certain features. I want wiki-like cross-referencing but don't want html output. Just text. I want to be able to edit in vim. Some basic formatting would be nice, and I want links to web sites to open in my browser. I want to be able to scan changes by date, to search through content, and to be able to view multiple entries at a single time. To-do lists are nice but I don't need a scheduler; I just need a place to keep track of current concerns. I want to integrate with my email, browser history, and IM logs.

Now that I list out the sorts of features I'd like to see, it looks like what I want is not just a single program.. it's a different way of interacting with my computer.
Hear, hear. OneNote is by far my favorite Microsoft application.
The hot YouTube chick that Coors doesn't want you to see
I'm speaking at this year's conference (thanks Joel!).

To expand on the write-up above, I think the Business of Software will likely be about, uhm, the business of software.

Potential questions that I'm hoping will be answered:

1. How do you decide how to price your product?

2. What are the economic tradeoffs for multi-tenancy in SaaS?

3. Are you spending too much or too little on customer support?

4. Do SaaS companies need more or less financing?

...
I just wonder?, what does anyone stand to gain by doing this?
it just doesn't make sense.I am no Google Fan boy, but the time wasted doing this would have been better used coding up something useful. Just my 2 cents anyway.
Actually, you'd be even better served looking at F#, since it has the functional programming characteristics that make functional programs more easily parallelizable than languages like Java.

Of course, you can also use things like LINQ and asynchronous workflows in C# to gain a lot of the benefits... but I'm really coming to like functional programming. I wish I'd known about it when I was building parallel applictions, it would have made the software I was developing much easier to write.

I also wish that I could be doing that again, rather than doing mainly maintenance work... even though I was recruited to develop parallel applications.
You really only need one question to test for INTP. Do you have a constant compulsive need to correct people for even very small errors in logical congruency regardless of the social consequences? Can you detect cognitive dissonance from like 100 meters away? Have you ever not really been listening to somebody but somehow still noticed that they contradicted what they just said two minutes ago? Have you already hit the 'reply' button to explain to me that four similar questions is not technically the same thing as one question?
Microsoft Is Cutting the Fat, Says Analyst (recessionary action?)
The best thing that ever happened to me in terms of my design skills was finding one person who knew a lot about design to rip my designs to shreds every time.

The reason for that is simple: You have to develop your eye.

Let me explain. One of the first major pursuits I took up was music - playing AND writing. Ever heard the phrase "develop your ear"? Basically, the more you do it, and the more you can hear the difference between the crap coming out of your instrument or computer sequencing program (in my case) and something professional, the better you'll be at finding those subtle things that make it that much better. When I got into recording engineering, I didn't know the difference between electric guitar sounds besides "distorted" and "not distorted." After getting feedback on my early mixes ("That sounds like shit."), I can now guess amp manufacturers and guitar brands with pretty good accuracy just by listening.

Now that I'm learning to code, I've discovered that it's similar. When I started, the difference between bad complex code and good complex code was not obvious to me. After having MY code refactored by my boss/mentor, I saw the difference unfold before my very eyes. Now I get compliments for writing clever, efficient code instead of "Um... can I sit down here? I'd like to go over that with you..."

So basically, aside from practice, it's about learning what to look for. Learn to identify what's good and what's bad about any design, and eventually, with practice, your own designs will improve. You HAVE to have both components, though, or you'll be stuck in an endless loop of making stuff that is different without actually being better. (Personal experience.)

That said, go get a book on typography from the library. Make sure it's one with lots and lots of pictures, diagrams, and full pages focusing on one or two typefaces. You don't have to read it cover to cover, but get the basics.

Once you've started, identify a few friends who are either great designers or at least who really know what they're talking about. Don't show it to random people who will say "yeah I guess that's good." That means "I don't know much about design, but that doesn't offend me so I guess it's okay." That's not helpful.

Also, http://kuler.adobe.com is pretty cool for picking color schemes.

Before and after articles on redesigns of web sites and print materials are really helpful as well.

Lastly, find some computer programs (NOT web apps) that look really good and stare at them until your eyes hurt. Safari is one of my favorites - it looks great, but everything that makes it look great is incredibly subtle - The font rendering on the bookmark bar has a nearly invisible bevel, which inverts on mouseover (for instance).

EDIT: After an hour or so, I realized that parts of this came off kind of arrogant. I am not an amazing hacker or the best audio engineer - I just wanted to relate growth in those disciplines to growth in design skills as well.
I once made the mistake of making a (true but) snarky comment to a co-worker, whose boyfriend happened to be a hobby taxidermist. They decided to get me back by filling the glovebox of my car with dead squirrels (which they conveniently had in their freezer, waiting to be stuffed).

They then arranged for a local cop to pull me over, and ask for my license and registration. I opened the glovebox to dig out the registration, and a seemingly endless cascade of dead squirrels began, while I started mumbling frantically....
I have a degree in design and half a degree in engineering :)

With respect to the topic.. good design studios get involved in a project from day one and have a tremendous impact on the outcome of the final project. It's not simply a "skin" over a technology. It's should be a critical part of your operation.

I find it bizarre that many people assume anything "artistic" requires innate talent and you either have it or you don't. Design requires constant practice and dedication to be good and ten years (or more) of experience to be truly great, just like any other discipline.

My designs from 15 years ago are laughably bad but now I can whip up some decent fairly quickly. On the other hand... I haven't programmed anything in 10 years and have a long learning curve ahead of me.

I'd recommend looking for some good designers on one of the freelance sites.. there's no shortage of choice. If you decide to go it alone, or even if you don't, I recommend picking up the book "Design Elements" by Timothy Samara. It's the best, most concise, book on the general principles of design I have yet to find. It will give you a good overview and some talking points with any designers you hire.

Good luck!
Ugh.. ignore the typos.. typed too quickly.
blackhat SEO: you artificially raise the pagerank of websites which attracts visitors and therefore advertising dollars.

it's about making money.
I would love an invite! (thanks!)
I like inkscape from inkscape.org better than GIMP and there are lots of tutorials around that tool.
Ask HN:  How would you teach kids to program?
A few of my kids (ages 14, 12, 9) have been on my case to teach them how to program. I thought I would start them out with a few simple problems in lisp and see where it goes. I do most of my work using c++ making video games but c++ seems too cumbersome to start with. So how would you go about it?
Once Upon Atari
'Homogenous' is a synonym for 'homogeneous'.

See: http://www.answers.com/homogenous and http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/homogenous
I think one of the best ways to break the barriers software developers/entrepreneurs face in understanding industries outside of the normal niches is to sit down with people in the industry and have a therapy session of sorts. Don't sell anything, but instead listen and learn carefully to what their concerns and problems are.

People in industrial fishing may not think that they have a need for new software, but there are undoubtedly needs and issues within the fishing industry that are completely opaque to those outside of it. And where there are pain points there are opportunities to innovate.
Tried downloading SVG zip... shows page not found...
The Dawn of Free Internet Access? FCC proposes auction of a portion spectrum with a free provision
Take a look at the Mindstorm robot building kits from Lego. You can involve the kids in both the hardware and the software and let them figure out which side is most interesting. Perhaps not the absolute best way to learn programming, but it looks like a fun start.
Talk to a lawyer.

Generally speaking, the idea can't be patented, but the implementation can be. Get a copy of the existing patent, and document how your implementation diverges. Have your lawyer see what the potential exposure is.
I use Org Mode for emacs. Each project idea gets its own org file in an all-project-ideas directory. Each file is added to an Org Mode meta-file that specifies the location of the org files.

I go through my ideas directory about once a week to keep things fresh.

Org Mode has built-in outlining support, date tags that bring items onto your calendar in several ways, and a ton of other features.

I tried it out for GTD a few months ago and got very quickly hooked. Until then I had been planning on writing my own web-based system.
Once downmods for a post cross a threshold, sheeps seem to get clicky.
Nice. A Harker grad.
Ask YC: Your VCs &/or Angel Investors of choice
Which VCs or Angel Investors will you go to if you are looking for funding for your start-up? (offer a list of +5)
P.S. The entire thing's version controlled so I can view and edit from any of my systems. I also collect ideas on paper, and later enter them into this system.
Hiring a Star Web Designer
Use “Keep trying” instead of “Don’t give up”
RAM just hasn't gotten cheaper at the same rate as clock cycles. Offering lots of memory for very little additional money couldn't possibly be cost-effective, unless Amazon is also memory-constrained for most of their applications.

Regardless, you can almost always trade CPU time and/or IO for memory in webapps. Limit your RAM caching, and move less-frequently-used data to temporary files on disk. Be more judicious in your SQL, so that you don't return large result sets to your application servers which then get filtered further in your business logic. Hell, run one or two fewer app server processes to begin with, and just bring up another EC2 image to handle load if you need it.
There is also that battle bots Java programming game IBM created.
Who's Smarter: Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg?
How do you integrate with 'remember the milk' ?
By that definition, you can say all web apps have that property.
What languages can we select?

Realistically (ie, if you're asking what to learn to get a job at one of these places), C++, Java, and C# because (outside of handful of places like Jane St) it seems like that is what everybody in these parts uses. (It's 'industry standard', after all [sigh])
Most accurate against what other measure? Has this been tested in some way, or is it just something people say?
_What languages can we select?_

Realistically (ie, if you're asking what to learn to get a job at one of these places), C++, Java, and C# because (outside of handful of places like Jane St) it seems like that is what everybody in these parts uses. (It's 'industry standard', after all [sigh])
YOUR TYPE
I	N	T	P
Strength of the preferences %
67	75	1	22

i dont get that. 1% thinking but yet

RANK of FUNCTION	FUNCTION	ORIENTATION
Dominant	Thinking	Introverted ( Ti )
Secondary	iNtuition	Extraverted ( Ne )
Tertiary	Sensing	Introverted ( Si )
Inferior	Feeling	Extraverted ( Fe )

The consequences of the orientation and rank of each of the four functions for the INTP type is described in turn below.

thinking seems to be the most dominant of INTPs?

i myself consider myself a thinker. maybe with a direction towards more practical means though rather than philospoher.
I'm INTP and my girlfriend is INTJ. I consider myself very lucky to have someone to relate to. We have a lot of the same habits -- e.g. we both stay up too late, are too stubborn, and we try to be completely honest with each other -- and usually this is nice, but sometimes we get carried away.

For example, when we met four months ago, we almost completely ignored our school work in favor of getting to know each other.

And for the past week we've been going to bed at 5am and waking up at noon. Ugh. :)
I'd like an invite too. metajack at gmail.com. Thanks!
B5media Partners With PicScout For Free Licensed Images
Ask YC: Looking to Redesign My Wordpress Blog. Leads?
I am looking to redesign my blog - which is running off of a Wordpress Install. Looking for a professional / web 2.0 feel with three columns and widgets-enabled.

Any leads or advice is welcome. What works well for bloggers here?

If you are a designer, I'd also love to hear.
Start with Python, its easy to understand and very versatile. when they get older, they will thank you for it.
That is, if they are dumb enough to click on the ads on the site.
Take the ChipWits Challenge!
I cannot wait to use this.
First I'd like to mention that I like the toys ideas mentioned here as a tactile introduction.

How did you learn to program? (Seriously, I'd like to know how fellow News.YC members learned)

I think for kids the most natural and fun way is to be self-taught, but have resources available to answer questions. I had an Atari 400 and eventually got bored with the games and wanted to program, so I put in the Atari Basic cartridge, looked at the graphics examples and started coding them in, then changing them, then writing my own stuff. I was completely self taught until I took a computer camp in the 7th grade and was exposed to mainframe computing and APL. That experience added to the base I had already established. The only downside to my experience is that I was exposed first to spaghetti code and did not learn to shun goto until after intro to computer science.
Tips on Long Term Emacs Productivity
i'm intj and my wife is esfj. she's going to school to become a therapist, while i'm finishing a cs degree... talk about opposites. but, it works.
Choosing the right language is only part of the question. What kind of problems do you think make for a good start?
I think the problem is more with non-technology businesses killing geeks. When a business doesn't fundamentally understand technology at its highest level they don't understand how best to employ the skills of geeks/developers/engineers/hackers.

I've seen too many great engineers getting turned off working with technology because of the time they spent working in traditional businesses that just don't get it.
Funny, I started on an Atari 400 too. I had a couple of older brothers that showed me a few things in Basic but I wish I had someone giving me better directions.
ENFP, though I really think this test is not as successful as it could be in percieving how we are in different situations.

I've tested as ENTP and INTP too.
I just went through this same questioning for a free tool for analyzing press releases (http://www.pressreleasegrader.com)

Based on this recent experience (and past experience), I generally lean towards just getting it out there and then iterating like hell.

Closed betas are nice to "control the flow", but most products don't have a "flood of traffic" problem, but a "nobody cares" problem.

Make it easy for people to try it out and give feedback, and respond swiftly to the feedback.
I actually lived in germany for a year too. Weird... I made all my friends through international student clubs, so I had almost no trouble there. Its coming back to grad school when I find myself with very few friends and noticeably fewer outlets through which to meet friends.

Our circle wasn't that we didn't let new people in, it was that people started graduating or whatever, and the circle got smaller without anyone to fill in the gaps. I guess that is because we didn't know anyone new, so we didn't have any "applicants" to join our circle of friends. I'm still convinced that all my problems here is because nobody walks here where I live. As soon as I can walk to other houses and cafes and bars, everything will get better.

It'd be an interesting sociological experiment to track the correlation between # of friends to distance walked per day.
Not according to OED (see http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50107551?single=1&qu...):

Article for homogenous only has two meanings listed:
1. Biol. = HOMOGENETIC 1.
2. Surg. Of transplanted tisssue: = HOMOPLASTIC a. 2.

I suppose the confusion in everyday speech made it into American dictionaries, but I still find its appearance in a magazine perceived to cater to intellectual snobs amusing.
scoble is a big crybaby.

this is the difference between a hacker and a non-hacker.

a hacker at twitter described a scaling problem in purely technical terms--the load on their servers is worst when a lot of updates are generated, and a lot of updates are generated when people with a lot of followers tweet in rapid succession (among other things).

http://dev.twitter.com/2008/05/youve-got-qs-weve-got-as.html

a non-engineer takes this purely objective statement of technical fact and turns it into a personal affront. twitter did not "blame" scoble. they stated the facts. scoble chose to be offended (wrongly, imo).
Trying to negotiate a salary? Some good tips
A Commenter's Rights
Lisp: No easy download
I heard of a guy who modified his friend's .bashrc to contain a sleep command with a variable time limit. Every time the .bashrc got run, the sleep command would run for a second longer. The first couple of times it was unnoticeable and after a few weeks he would log in, then go grab a sandwich before he could do anything. Subversive!
Smug Lisp Weenies and Lateral Thinking
Did you mean… ? In php
Semantic Search: The Myth and Reality
That whopping 2K ram barrier forced me to be creative, and that awful touchpad. I could never get the tape drive to work properly, so I would keep the system up for days or weeks at a time. Its funny that Syracuse University had this mainframe system and I was mostly interested in playing with one of the Atari 800 computers at Bird Library (I think, its been a while)
Well put. I'm still a lisp newbie (I've only made one useful thing with lisp), and I still end up trying to do [[x]] :/
Resubmitted in response to

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=204130
"What to do if you are a good developer but no designer?"
google notebook for quotes, ideas I see in the web.

rememberthemilk - for my action items, also includes my "read notebook" tasks

basecamp - for my project action items

By the way, I also have invites on evernote. send me an email yajmail at gmail
I'm so tempted to try it out with n number of windows m/c around ;)
It's instructive to read the prose about all of the types this test partitions people into. Do it before you see your results. Can you pick the one that describes you ahead of time?

They're all flattering and describe experiences that I think most humans have at some point. The sense that something written for a very broad audience applies specifically to you can be deceiving. That's part of why horoscopes are popular.

I came out as an ENTP this time (I've scored as an INTP and INFP in the past) but the profile for ISFP also describes characteristics I'd like to think I have.

I'm suspicious of things like personality sorters. This one takes the more continuous and multifaceted range of human personality and quantizes it into four binary dimensions. Even assuming those categories represent some kind of tendency for human personalities to cluster around certain traits, are sorters like this helpful? Do they provide some genuine insight you didn't have before? Or are they just a more sophisticated variety of horoscope?

You answer a bunch of vague and general questions, and get a vague and general answer. Your input is 72 bits, and the output is only 4 bits. Were those 4 bits really such a mystery to begin with? Would the results be different if the test just briefly described both categories for each dimension, and had you pick the one that sounded more like you?

If you can pick your personality out beforehand by reading short descriptions of the personality types, what was the point of answering 72 questions? If you can't, are you still willing to accept that your type really describes you?
I took a "leadership" course at work recently and it was all based on Meyers-Briggs and learning what your personality type is and how to deal with other personality types. The Meyers-Briggs test and the whole "ecology" around it seems to me a way for some subset of the business training industry to make a buck.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator#Cri... for criticism of Meyers-Briggs.
Anonymous said it best: http://www.lispcast.com/drupal/node/29#comment-69
What kind of problems do your kids want to solve? Find something that will drive them. Do they want to make a website on your home network? There is something with some basically immediate gratification that can grow as they learn.
How to promote the spread of mobile phones among the world's poorest
Perhaps -- but even if that is true, interacting with more machines is presumably a trivially parallelizable operation, so it shouldn't double the overall response latency.
Yes. But only you're invited.
Something that interests them - a concrete project that can be wrapped up without going on for too long, and without requiring too much help from dad. Something visual or something with effects in the real world might be neat, but it probably depends on them.

Python's probably a pretty good language to start with.
> work experience will depend on your team much more than your company

I have just discovered this for myself. I went from a very closed-off, conservative, and staid team to a newer, more open, and more flexible team. The team-change was more significant than the initial job change.
Oh yeah, wow. That is a big change.
INFP when i fall in love, INTP otherwise
I'm a ENTP and rarely post. I am right on the line between INTP/ENTP. I've seen people on the line refered to as an XNTP. I've taken the test a number of times over the years and always end up with the same type.

I know I am, as more of an extrovert, just as likely to voice my opinions in any number of different ways. I think if anything this forum provides a way for introverts to voice their opinions.
My wife has the same problem. She's a public school teacher, and their software makes my eyes want to bleed. They still use a text-based GUI for their attendance system.

And they've got a piece of software to input your lesson plans, but you still need to print it out at the end of the year.

However, the school and the district have leadership problems, so software should be a little lower on their priority list.

I've thought about hacking up an easy classroom/school management app that would be similar to WordPress. Install and go.
French Paper Claims FiOS Is Dead
http://techritic.wordpress.com/2008/05/30/mark-zuck-idiot/
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say Bill Gates.

The man has absolutely no taste, but I really doubt Faceberg is smarter.