skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe I should have expanded a bit. I think the WalMart healthcare system would be about as good as the WalMart-branded clothing. Not good.

If Taco Bell started to service your car while you were in the drive through, some men in business suits might say it's a good synergistic initiative. I mean, your car is already there in the drive through.

But really, Taco Bell makes horrifically shitty tacos. Is that even meat they use? It's embedded deeply in the corporate culture to make shitty tacos, and I am positive the same philosophies they use in building their tacos would go into the quality of their in-drive-through-car-repair.

WalMart, similarly, does everything cheaply and fucks with entire markets by using their power to demand certain prices or functionality. WalMart effectively morphs some companies into Wal*Mart-like companies. I think it would be stupid to assume they wouldn't do the exact same thing to healthcare professionals.

Can you imagine having the same person who negotiated the price of a toilet bowl brush down from $1.99 to $0.99 by demanding the toilet brush company use half as much plastic as being the same person negotiating with the doctor to delay your xray a few days?
My interesting ideas in life always came when there were girls around I wanted to impress. As I get older, they come not so often. I read that the most inspired works of Romantic and Classical composers were all written before age 25 with a big exception being Beethoven's and Mozart's final symphonies. It's believed the inspiration behind those symphonies was brought on by the illnesses that killed them.
he's not a thief. he committed fraud by giving fake names when opening bank accounts, or something like that. then these companies voluntarily deposited money into his accounts; that part isn't stealing, even if it's based on fraud.

also the article calls him a hacker not because he did something impressive with computers but because he did something illegal with them. sigh...
I honestly don't remember, but my mom swears I 'invented' the idea of a maglev train when I was five or six.
Although, according to the drawing I made at the time, my solution for keeping the train on the tracks was to build walls on either side, so I'm not sure how I expected people to board or exit the train :D
Because browsers suck and native javascript behavior is not predictable across platforms.

In GWT the browser is abstracted and you dont worry about it. You write AJAX code and it always works. Firefox, IE, iPhone, whatever.

Writing the code itself is not where the real time investment is with ambitious ajax projects. Its wasted in browser-related quirks and debugging. Being able save this valuable time and focus on building something cool is worth it in my opinion.

Also GWT is just plain faster.
Is your company ready for the Apple Invasion?
I use a simple coding challenge as a weeder question. It requires basic use of recursion (without explicitly saying so) -- no math, no big-O, no gotchas, just writing a simple recursive function to process a small tree. It takes decent coders a few minutes to complete. Less-than-decent coders really struggle with it.

This is only a wheat/chaff separator, though. If possible, I like to see code from actual projects they've worked on to get a feel for the bigger picture (tip: open source your personal projects and obsess a bit over the code, so you have something to show off). Plus there's all the other non-code aspects to the interview.
You'll find the word "hack" serves no real purpose when you're put into administration. Detroit's problems are related mainly to old union agreements and oil prices, as well as scewed demand curves related to mpg requirements that didn't apply to light trucks and artificially low interest rates. Using the word "hack" 200 times in an article just obscures a subject.
Good article, but seems to lack any concrete substance. It seems to imply that "Hacking" stands for everything that's good and modern.

Now, I'm all for good and modern, but it doesn't have to be labeled "hacking" to be so.
> Would you rule out a candidate who doesn't know 0xFE ?

If they didn't know it after a moment's thought, I'd cut them some slack; If they couldn't calculate it, with pencil and paper, in 10 minutes (and that's giving them plenty of extra time for interview-nervousness), then I'd be seriously concerned.
I was 4-5. I was drawing these grand fountains and water works systems and my grandfather looked at one and saw that water was flowing uphill and explained in basic terms gravity and the Archimedes principle to me.

After that I always wanted to be correct in my drawings so I got interested in children science books. My mom read me kids science stories/tales. I preferred them to fairy tales.

I was 9. I remember imagining how it would be cool if instead of cells my body consisted of tiny robots that intermeshed together and substituted for various bodily functions. Sorta like nano bots I came to learn about 15 years after

I was 10. it was 1988. Soviet Union. I kept drawing a small submarine with all the life support, buoyancy and structural elements I could think of. I wanted to swim from Chukotka/Kamchatka to Alaska
Talking Back to Your Customers - The Web 2.0 Way
Hey, that's a great find, thank you .
And a guy on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire's Movie Week made a cool $250,000 just by knowing about that plot device from Office Space:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5monB4fIzy8

It looks like he was excited to get that question.
Thanks for the nicely distracting article!
I think Sergry and Larry symbolize hackers that became bosses while Jobs symbolizes just a 'great boss' ...
My favourite part is about the lack of memory protection on the multi-user PDP-11/20:

When anyone was working on a program, it was considered a courtesy to yell "A.OUT?" before trying it, to warn others to save whatever they were editing.
conceivably, more people would turn to mass transit, but is mass transit ready for them? im in chicago, and with our ongoing cta crisis, i can only imagine seeing 20 minute waits to get into a delayed overcrowded train running on poor quality tracks turn into 120 minute waits.
Chuck Norris.
This ad is funny. Who wrote it? Paul?
Please explain how you know this.
I predict as web applications get increasingly complicated, javascript will be viewed as more of a low-level language which will be compiled down to from higher level abstractions. Not because javascript is a bad language, but because browser fragmentation is so bad. It may not just be Java (in the form of GWT), but other languages as well.

Google has actually been doing this for a while now, even before GWT. Much of the javascript that is used in their apps is generated via compiler in one form or another.
> I was 4-5. I was drawing these grand fountains and water works systems and my grandfather looked at one and saw that water was flowing uphill and explained in basic terms gravity and the Archimedes principle to me.

Good thing he wasn't M. C. Escher's grandfather! :)
I was about six years old when I remember thinking to myself: I have a lot of great ideas. All I need is an 8 or 10-year old to help me make them cause I'm too young.

I'm sure the ideas weren't that great, but the critical thinking is more important.
Jobs on Your Site
We have a very useful aggregation site called LINKUP where we have aggregated jobs ONLY from company websites, none from job boards. Interested in the views of YC and HN as to whether the community would find this useful/helpful if they saw it on a third party site.
Every interesting idea I get, later turns out to be a rehash. Especially the ones I fall in love with. It's some kind of deficiency, wonder if it can be cured.
http://www.amazon.com/Peoples-Tycoon-Henry-American-Century/...
The People's Tycoon - Henry Ford and the American Century.
He was a lot of things people didn't realize he was and wasn't a lot things people want to believe he was.
Probably around age 4, although at the time, most of them had to do with aliens, robots, and dinosaurs.
Holographic Video Conferencing
Lessons on recommendation systems
This reminds me of a group of main frame programmers I knew who had been forced to become Perl web developers. About a month later they were asked to hire another Perl programmer and one of their interview questions was what's the difference between 'chomp' and 'chop' (chomp removes the final character of a string if it's a newline, chop does it regardless).

They were shocked that the interviewee didn't know the answer because they considered it basic knowledge, "it's in the first chapter for gosh sake." The first chapter in this case covered differences between Perl 4 and Perl 5.

In Perl 5, nobody uses 'chop', they all use 'chomp.' Many experienced Perl programmers might even have forgotten that 'chop' existed.

And that's my major problem with gotcha questions, they tend to be pretty far from measuring if a person can actually write productive code.
Setup Video:
http://www.musion.co.uk/watch_setup_video.html
Yes. Use the default alias to send all non-account email to /dev/null, and also set doublebounceto to /dev/null.
Time to screen-scrape like it's 1999!
How to become Web2.0ish
GWT applications ARE straight javascript. It's how you create and maintain those humongous javascript applications that is the question. And GWT is a killer answer.
As a web app developer, I've found memory to be the greatest bottleneck for both web and database servers. But this will no doubt be useful for sites like animoto that need to do a lot of offline processing.
Typical train platforms are tall enough to keep a train on the tracks. Five-or-six-year-old you may have had that in mind. Maybe you accidentally drew the walls too tall.

http://ourdoings.com/brlewis/photo.html?th=jx/sb/svx2.jpg...
Browser problems really aren't that bad if you use a cross-platform JavaScript library. The core language behaves basically the same in all browsers (except for the trailing-commas issue in IE), it's just the DOM and event-handling models that are a mess.
Note that both of your ideas are in messy, heavily-regulated industries.

Perhaps this fact may be partly responsible?
http://clinical.diabetesjournals.org/cgi/content/full/26/1/1...

Where things are now. Check the cites/links on the bottom

http://jac.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/55/4/413

Antiretroviral adherence, drug resistance, viral fitness and HIV disease progression: a tangled web is woven. This article is great. Also it has a bunch of cites and links to other relevant issues.

http://www.ajmc.com/files/articlefiles/AJMC1995OctCramer167_...

Partial Medication Adherence, The Enigma in Poor Medical Outcomes. It's old (1995) but still relevant.

That's all for now. Dig through those and their links and you'll find a lot to get started.
Well that could be it. But still i think - if idea is adding more value to current industry then there is a scope. But I am not PG ( not yet ;) ) so, my thinking doesn't count ( counts for me - not for others ).
Ask YC: What else do you read?
What other sites are on your daily must read list? Not techcrunch/techmeme et al, and maybe not even web related, but interesting and not the same crap that gets cross posted to a bazillion blogs.

I love:
http://paul.kedrosky.com/
http://fintag.com
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/
I see they still insist on using confusing units. Would it be so hard to say 2.5 GHz?
How to Maintain Not-Quite-Daily Habits
I read StraightDope.com from time to time. Some pretty interesting stuff turns up there.
Pretty cool but why a plugin? Gems, please!
i'm 15 and i want to become the geatest hacker ever for those who read this e-mail me at surescore@hotmail.com
thanks

ps.can you give me some programs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blub_(programming)
That's the attitude! There's plenty of problems you can solve. Just keep trying any don't let your mistakes hold you down. =)
I code for the chicks, man. Duh.
:massive ego:

boring, next!
Call me skeptical if you will, but the article's flavor contains a hint too much breathless exuberance for my taste.
Yeah, for some reason he forgot to list "I accidentally crashed the Internet" as an accomplishment on his home page.
I think there is a version of this article in the desk drawer of everyone who writes about tech.
When I was 5-7 I would always take apart any broken electronic and try to figure out what it did. Obviously, except for understanding the connection between the parts, LEDs and switch most of the stuff didn't make much sense.

But my goal was to understand electronics enough to modify a cell phone, so I could use it as a telephone jack that I could plug in a laptop (wireless 56k modem). I though it could revolutionized the world.

Obviously this wasn't the best approach for this problem, but I was still pissed when I saw the first wireless internet cards from Telcos.
The Broccoli Programming Language
HN? Ah, Hacker News. I am a noob here and at first glance, I thought you lived at HN: http://homelessnation.org/
When I was 8 or 9 I came up with a basic design for a perpetual motion machine (it involved little dynamos on a track, and a ball running back and forth over them). No, I didn't use the term "perpetual motion machine". Anyway, I explained it to my mother who said it wasn't possible.

Well, if I have a kid, I'm going to buy him some dynamos and tell him to build that sucker.
Scaling Rails...Down
That made me smile!
(fn filter ($func @lst)
(:= @ret (list))

(for $e in @lst
(if (call $func $e)
(:= @ret (cat $e @ret))
)
)

@ret
)
Those "cross-platform" libraries aren't:

- Faster
- Slimmer
- Better

compare to GWT.
Could you point out some examples of this research? I guess it has something to do with events and routines being episodic memories, whereas abstract ideas is more of a metacognitive/executive task?

Actually, the ideas themselves would be declarative, if there were details involved. Now I'm confused. Would like to read about.
(fn map ($func @lst)
(if (= @lst (list))
(list)
else
(cat	(call $func (first @lst))
(map $func (rest @lst))
)
)
)
5 Things Grady Booch Has Learned About Complex Software Systems
Because it massively violated user expectations of privacy on the web?
Maybe a better article would have been:

"Is your company ready for higher attrition rates when your most skilled workers leave because you won't let them use the tools they prefer?"

Maybe the title's too long.
Spread Firefox | Download Day 2008
Interesting... but it's not all that different from indeed.com, is it? Indeed does include jobs from job boards (including relatively obscure ones) but treats them equally to company websites. (They also have some waycool comparison and salary data that's fun to play with.)
Just a couple examples (below) of what the code looks like. Sigils differentiate between scalars and collections (lists only at the moment). Functions can be passed by name and called either directly (in parens) or indirectly (with the call function). Written in C and Broccoli. Nothing incredibly earth-scattering, but it is my attempt to write the language that I would like to code in.
Great read although I'm not sure I understand the assembly part :/
Am I an idiot for scanning almost halfway through the article before realizing it's 12 years old? Methinks I am.
Low-level machine hacks can be inscrutable even when the machine they're implemented for is current. For instance, there's the infamous line from Quake source code that reads:

i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); // what the fuck?

People have tried to investigate the origin of this baffling hack and mostly failed. See, e.g., http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/ .
With Wedding Bells, Novelty Sells
First Quarter Growth Domestic Product Revised Higher to 0.9%
On Good Taste
Economic growth revised up in first quarter
New-Age Marketing: A Primer
Oil Plunges After Morning Surge
"Nomic" - a game in which changing the rules is a move
Crude oil plunges as U.S. explains surprise supply drop
Stewart Brand interviews Freeman Dyson
Benchmarks anyone?
DoS attacks are illegal. If this were some kid in his basement, the FBI would have long since busted down his door and hauled him off to juvie.

What's with the double standard?
Fan-generated Star Trek series: Starship Exeter
Fan-generated Star Trek series: New Voyages
Why Broccoli?

My curiosity was piqued so I went to your site and found a bit on how to do broccoli, but no links or text jumped out at me as to why to do broccoli. Is it just a novelty, or does it scratch some itch that other languages don't address?
From what I have heard from new Air owners, it's the CPU and the disk drive. It's pokey all around. Compactness is its primary and only virtue.
I'm not really sure what area of research this would fall under. The closest I can think of is "infantile amnesia," although that would be a stretch. As far as I know there is no established way to classify ideas, so that would make this a question not very well-suited for academic research. Actually, one of the reasons why I asked is because I'm interested in looking for patterns in what people consider to be interesting ideas. So far there are a lot of parallels with the answers that people here have been giving for the "what have you discovered" question, which is amusing, albeit not especially surprising.

If you are interested in infantile amnesia though, this paper is kind of interesting and gives a decent overview of the different theories:

Harley, K. & Reese, E. (1999). Origins of autobiographical memory. Developmental Psychology, 35, 5, 1338-1348.
Twitter's New Valuation: A "Bit Less" Than $100 Million
Huh. How'd you find that, and why is it there?
Ok, but, still: why broccoli? At first blush it looks similar to Arc (granted, I don't know much about Arc) or any other implementation of Scheme or Common Lisp.

What's special about Broccoli?
Writing code is artwork.
You can ask the artist about the specifics of his tools, but you will never grasp his artistic ability until you see the completed artwork.
I just ask some general questions about the tools.
The tools for code writing are:
starting, constants, variables, addressing, comparing, branching and ending.
Nearly all have competitors. Plus any startup trying to raise money has to compete with pretty much every other startup currently trying to.
Yes, but abstracted away to Java?

Ok, I see you have a point and that does seem like a good idea. The choice of language just seems crazy.
Yes, the major difference is that on LINKUP.COM we only have jobs from company sites. Indeed scrapes jobs from all over, some have been filled, some are third party jobs etc. About half of the jobs on LINKUP have never even been advertised. Do you think that a highly visited site would find it more appealing to offer to its visitors...it is like a service to visitors. Or not?
You need an easy way to pass around anonymous functions, or you can't easily implement Don't Repeat Yourself. Result? You repeat yourself and write poorly factored code.

Writing poorly factored code is the norm. Sturgeon's law applies here too. That doesn't mean it should be your goal, however.
Bellingham, WA: Doing things well/skillfully/right isn't important.
Haha yep. I like that movie no matter how ridiculous it is. Some of the motivational techniques in that movie would work wonders.
I forgot another all-time favorite. I must've read this one when I was about 10 and a couple of times since. Genghis Khan: Emperor of All Men, by Harold Lamb.
Nice ad, certainly caught my eye!
WSJ, my local paper (The Phoenix), & http://watrcoolr.us
pg has stated a preference for avoiding industries wherein one has to get permission from huge companies to even exist...but then again, Loopt is perhaps his favorite YC company, and it exists only by the blessing of cell carriers. (Though one could build an iPhone/Android Loopt today without anyone's permission, but I reckon you'd have tough competition, since I'm sure Loopt will be in that space as well.)
My fear is that, should I ever have a child, it will be completely uninterested in building, reading or learning, and therefore I will be out of my depth. My child would probably be a social butterfly.

In fact, I'm quite sure that this would happen. As jwz says, the universe tends toward maximum irony.
Hey zhyder, this is great! And if you want to make money, here is the perfect thing to add for paying users: dimensions! Artists could easily use this to layout art on a wall! Let them set the width of the wall, and the size of paintings, etc., and then let they lay them out on the wall, and give them the dimensions! My girlfriend could start using this today if it had that, and we'd gladly pay for it!
Sometimes I think I was born at the wrong time. I sure would have loved to hack in the bad old days of computing where the computer came with schematics and you understood exactly (or had a good try of it) what the machine was doing.

At least, I think I'd like it better than hoping that my motherboard can authorize itself to the drm in my graphics card so the hi-def from my own camera will play on my screen at more than 320x240.
It's interesting that you've opted to use Perl-style sigils, given the hatred many programmers experience when seeing them (pg covers it with "no swearing" in his arc guidelines).

I happen to like them, particularly for interpolation in strings...and strings are so much of what we do with web applications. "There are $number posts" is much more pleasant, to me, than "There are " . number . " posts". But I might be weird, and there does seem to be an aversion to them in most recent languages that have achieved popularity.
Posting info about what I assume is a DOS attack, on the domain being attacked, seems a little silly. (Link isn't loading for me).
I'd love to be able to come up with something like Nomic in which the rules are expressed in a programming language.

I suspect it would be incredibly cumbersome, but it's on my list of things to try.
"Writing the code itself is not where the real time investment is with ambitious ajax projects. Its wasted in browser-related quirks and debugging."

That has not been my experience. I've found that the vast majority of my JavaScript development time goes to areas that are hassles in any rich UI programming (I was a Swing and then Netbeans developer before I turned to the web):

1.) Forgetting to call a listener or otherwise update UI state.

2.) Finding that the UI really works better if some faraway component auto-updates its state when you change this menu item, and having to plumb the update through the whole app.

3.) Working out corner cases when the user selects some combination of options that's so crazy you didn't think anyone could possibly choose it.

I usually do all my development in Firefox and then set aside a week or so to port to IE, which I know everybody says is a terrible development practice, but it's worked on multiple projects for me. I just memorize all the areas where I'm likely to have problems, and avoid them. I usually find that well ofter 60% of the bugs are trailing commas anyway - the event-handling and DOM differences are taken care of by JQuery, and there really are not that many other core language differences.
The evidence is only visible to those who know how to look...
It's on the front page of slashdot now.
Very true, but too often people end up focusing on tools instead of what you do with them.

I suspect most people engaged in PHP/Ruby/Python/Erlang/etc use them as much as suburban dads use their Black & Decker powertools. Seems to me you either obsess about your tools or you actually use them - few do both.
- My previous startup's experience with patents was: if you want to, you can write a patent that weaves around areas covered by other patents. So, with enough effort, the answer is yes.

- Please don't do this: gliffy does does for the free version, and it's really annoying. If you want, make it so that a popup comes up and makes you choose whether it should be public or not, or just leave it opt-in.
Sorry.. This was supposed to be in reply to "Unfortunately some people think that means there's no point in seeking out good brushes and paint."