skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How to go about this (generating revenue from Premium SMS transactions):

1) Secure a 5 or 6 digit ShortCode from Neustar(the only seller of shortcodes, usshortcodes.com) This will take approximately 1 month and cost $1000/month billed in 3 month intervals. Premium messaging only works with a shortcode, so this is necessary.

2) Secure a contract with an SMS provider. I strongly suggest m-Qube, which is now owned by Verisign. Their service is excellent in every way. Great APIs, superior uptime and performance, superior support, very competitive rates, excellent relationships with the carriers.

3) Draft a 'Program Brief' following the carrier guidelines, that explains your application. These guidelines are very specific (things like how you offer the ability to opt-out, advertise your tariffs, etc.) and your application must conform to them perfectly before the carriers will approve it.

4) Submit the Program Brief for carrier approval. This process takes between 1 to 3 months depending on the nature of the application, particular carrier, etc. The approval process may, and often does, include redoing some of your application to suit the carriers.

5) Assuming all the carriers approve your Program Brief, you can then start charging users when you send them a response. (sending a message is the only event you can charge a premium tariff for).

The carriers each have a specific revenue sharing breakdown that is dependent on volume, price point, etc. In the case of m-Qube, they also take a small cut. Negotiating directly with the carriers is another endeavor entirely that I dont have any expertise in.
What is patentable about this? I don't understand what is novel about it.
Basecamphq.com is good for a small team.

I use punch for time tracking since it fits my workflow better than basecame time tracking. `gem install punch`
You should favor simple, elegant and flexible code. Why? Because it tends to be the code that is the easiest to prove correct. Even if you don't want to prove it correct, that kind of code tends to be easy to read, easy to adapt and easy to change.

My preferred measurement is to look at how easy it would be to prove a couple of nontrivial theorems about the code you are looking at. The easier that would be, in a perceived view, the better I find the code. If you kludged 2-3 things of no relation into the same function, it proves to be extremely hard to state meaningful cases in proofs about it.

Good code arises with 2 things: Persistence and iteration. It is when you leave code and never come back to improve it that things begin to go wrong. Think about it: All successful source code projects have these two traits. People keep coming back to read old code and improve it. They persistently iterate the code into better shape. Hence, you should favor code that is easy to read and understand. If it is not, then it will be rewritten in the next iteration when someone glances at it. Unless it contains some elegant piece that saves you a lot of the headache -- you will know when you try to rewrite it into "simpler" code. The persistence and iteration of old code to better it, is what most bad management do not understand about software construction.
It's much easier to see what's bad about code written by other people. I suggest you look at some really bad code, and then try and imagine what a superior programmer would find offensive about your code.

You can always visit thedailywtf.com if you're lucky enough not to be exposed to bad code on a daily basis. My personal pet hates are copy-and-paste code, inconsistent formatting, excessively long lines, bad or non-existent naming conventions, Hungarian notation, and spelling mistakes - pretty basic stuff.
I am totally in the simple, but longer camp. There's absolutely no benefit from being overly clever about your implementations. It's just going to take you 10x longer down the road to figure out how to debug the damn thing.

My first programming job was a shop where we actually wrote reference code that would be implemented by other companies into various chipsets. There was no room for lack of clarity there. Everything, absolutely everything, must be crystal clear. I've taken many of the things I've learned there to all my other programming projects.
Futurist Paul Saffo on How to Do Well in a Recession
Haven't heard about punch yet. Can you use that in teams?

Basecamp is awesome but it's not really for startups. No nested Tasks, no multiple people for tasks. Time tracking is too basic. Not the end of the world, really, but DHH and Jason hate feature-creep so I'm not holding my breath.
Actually I think the Imperial system is better in this case. I find it easier to remember a number which is an integer in the 20-40 range than a real between 5 and 10.

I find that in my mind, most of the relevant numbers tend to get rounded up to "a bit less than ten" anyway.
Actually, the window stickers on new cars (at least in this state) do have a "total estimated annual fuel cost", don't they?
This outcome is common when Google opens new offices. A number of my friends have had the same experience when Google opened up offices in Boston and New York. They are looking for senior leadership positions at first, then staffing out with great hackers once the office is more established. Good luck with your job search!
I self taught high school this year. I think you're mistaken to paint it as white as you do, but I do prefer it to school in some ways.

That said, I am going to university.
Dude was high as a kite when he wrote that.
I'm currently using bugzilla at work, and it has the same problem you mention with trac - adding new tickets is a pain in the ass. However, I love the integration with Mylyn http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/ because I spend my whole day in eclipse. If you use eclipse, mylyn integration is a huge plus - just because you can set a context and it will track how long you spent working on a task, as well as your estimate. Outside of eclipse and the office, I use an instance of tiki-wiki running on the same VPS I use for SVN. Tiki has a lot of features, but the default interface blows.
I liked this book

http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Digital-Signal-Processin...

Also the 2nd volume of "Musimathics" by Gareth Loy has a good introduction to DSP in the context of music and audio.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstrip...
There’s pretty much nothing I’d rather do outside of family time than spend a few hours talking with the entrepreneurs who run OUR companies about their businesses and the opportunity and challenges facing them

OUR? Okay.
He does make a point that a good deal of the Web 2.0 resources are going into rather banal items: new chat, new social networking, making simple things a bit cooler and maybe a bit simpler. Can you blame him for wanting to be involved in more revolutionary developments, taking all of this great technology and really making a difference in the world?
Well, that was informative.

Tell me, are the books you're reading which contradict popularly-held notions about the Nazis by a guy called David Irving, by any chance?
You might be able to use it instead of Viagra(R).
I went back and re-read your explanation above, and my constructive criticism would be the following:

1. Use a table, or horizontal grid of divs to represent the calendar. You can write different server or client side code to render different presentations, e.g. calendar, 5 day view, 7 day view etc.

2. In this grid, tag each div with the appropriate date stamp as appropriate for your application.

3. Build code on the client side to track mouse drags, clicks, or whatever you need to provide the user with a great experience specifying start and end times.

None of this sounds that hard or tricky, and I would certainly be happier with an approach that separated out generating time tagged divs from the presentation and selection mechanism.
Yeah. I noticed that too.
I tried to remember as I don't know the exact XKCD I read, as I was going through them from the first.

The basic complaint is some kind of "How are people like Hitler elected" statement was in the cartoon, and I knew the answer as I'd read up to 1939 of the book the Rise and Fall of the 3rd Reich, which is I hope not revisionist.

I'll be careful to be more clear in future here.
Yeah, I did all this. :) For part 2, I still need a helper function like this because the timestamp changes (when the user resizes, moves, etc.). Does that make more sense? I have a grid of DIVs, on which I position events on top of.

EDIT: I see what you mean. For part 3, for example, I want "12:05", not "12:04:27". Yeah, I was getting to that.
It's a bit like throwing a party. If we open the doors and we're the only ones home (as awesome as we are), people who stop by are less likely to stay and get involved than if there's a crowd of people already partying that they can join.

So we're keeping the alpha closed at first, so we can fix things and grow our userbase to a decent size without embarrassing ourselves. We do want to open up as soon as possible after that.
Is it really that impressive compared to the mirror in any of the world's largest telescopes? I mean, good work being built by students at low cost and all, but any serious observatory will have a mirror which is larger and a lot smoother.

On the other hand, I just got back from my first trip to Chicago where I was insanely impressed by the giant mirrored jellybean in Millennium Park, so I don't deny the impressiveness of big shiny objects.
It seems that payment processing is the biggest issue here. People are very reluctant (rightfully so) to give up their financial information, so I think it is a good idea to start with an existing service like PayPal or amazon FPS. Next, I would select frameworks based on the development environment you're most familiar with. I might choose java/spring/hibernate/struts2 or even raw jdbc and servlets because I've spent so long in the java world, but many in this community would probably lean towards RoR or similar. I think it's almost always easier to go with what you know.
I don't think the article makes enough sense to be called socialism. It sounds more like what would happen if you gave a 12-year-old a copy of Google's mission statement and a Wikipedia article about Joseph Schumpeter and said, "Misunderstand all of this, then write a thousand words about it."
Working on scalability of an RDF server at an established semantic web company. Enjoying going to moffet field every day. Not enjoying lack of free time as I finish prototypes of my own project.
Punch makes a .yml file in your home directory. You could make some app to pull in the .yml from everyone in your team. My time tracking needs are simple as I only need to track what I do, when and for how long so that I can bill my clients.

I didn't like basecamp either until recently. I have met some very productive people who used only a .txt file for project management.
Thanks for linking to this. It makes me feel even better about unsubscribing from Techcrunch a few months ago.
On the origin of "nothing is true, everything is permitted"
Have you heard of goplan.info? I found it to be a very nice alternative to Basecamp. Nested tasks, tickets, milestones, it's all there.
Fighting a "War" Against Distraction
I think it was probably meant more in the 'companies in OUR portfolio' sense than the literal 'these are OUR companies'.
Ask HN: What should I try to do while still in college?
I've just finished sophomore year at a good liberal arts university.

I have two more years left here; what should I try to do? What should I bias for? What do you, someone who is no longer in college, wish you did, and found most useful during your time there?

More about me:
So far, I've spent most of my time learning how to do work, then how to do hard work, and about myself (ADHD, etc). (In fact, I'm procrastinating right now.) I spent most of my childhood doing what I was interested in (lego, then computers), which doesn't develop the skills needed for college.

I'm a Computer Science and Mathematics double major, but I'm not sure if I'm clever enough for pure math; I am aceing the CS classes, though. I'm vaguely participating in a startup-like venture, but there is little pressure, and hence little actual startup atmosphere - but still good experience. I've thought many times about dropping out (of college), but I seriously don't have a plan, aside from the vague notion of "going to SF and figuring something out". Besides, it seems like a good idea to get a college degree + the CS/Math sophistication alongside it. Nevertheless, I'm quite bored, by the vapid partying (which I refuse to take part in - decimating my social life), the happy-go-lucky attitude of most people, and lectures + homework in general.

My life goals? I want excitement (see ADHD, above). Maybe with computers. The current startup frenzy seems to fit like a glove, but I've only heard about it on the internet.
https://www.drproject.org/

Quote: DrProject is a web-based project management portal that integrates revision control, issue tracking, mailing lists, a wiki, and other tools that software development teams need to succeed.

DrProject was originally a fork of a popular lightweight open source portal called Trac.
I thought of qmail and some of djb's other code too. He has an idiosyncratic but apparently effective way of doing things.

I also like Scheme48.
(clever code is faster)?clever:clearer...wait, what?
Get heavily involved in a campus organization that suits your interests. If such an organization doesn't exist, start one.
I am using (and loving) Unfuddle for a 2-person project. It's like trac, but with some nice extras. Creating new tickets is easy. They also have a Mac widget you can install for creating/viewing tickets (I don't use it personally).

The only downside is it's $9/month if you have more than one developer.. You can always sign up for a free account first to see if you like it though.
Goplan.info looks really nice. Thanks for the recommendation.
Animated Sorting Algorithm Demo
You may want to take a look at http://gulpd.com It has just been released in private beta but you can sign up and it is free for now. Fairly easy to use albeit still in active development.
My biggest regret from college is not getting more involved with the activities/groups my college offered. I was plenty active around campus socially, but I was only in one group my entire four years. (Well, two if you consider being a computer assistant a group.) You will gain a lot and not feel as if you missed out on what your college has to offer by participating -- not to mention all the friendships you'll build in the process. Get out there and join groups!
We're using unfuddle. It's pretty much like basecamp and trac combined. A good product, and the company listens to your suggestions.
#1 regret (which I will probably make up, job quitting possibilities) - Not going abroad - Doesn't necessarily mean studying abroad but traveling for month+ outside your home country during inter-school summer vacations
So the first comment in the actual article is someone howling that GTA4 was made on Windows by Windows fanatics who hate Apple, and now the first comment on Hacker News is the same thing.

Is this some sort of ingrained reflex?

(Also, I can't assume you've played any of the GTA series, but if you do you will note that everything -- EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD -- comes in for heavy-handed cynical satire. The game's humor is not biased at all, just completely nihilistic and venomous.)
I'm involved in two things: the newspaper, and this 'programming' group. The newspaper's been fun - I'm quite interested in the whole gambit of publishing. The programming group hasn't done anything because no one wants to spend time in it - I've been programming alone all my life, so it's no different if no one is doing it with me.
I come from Hong Kong (luckily not too damaged by deafeningly unindividualistic culture) - and spent the two years before college in Norway (http://www.uwc.org). Also quite constrained by financial difficulties.
first, people have to care enough before they can change the world. in my experiences, many people just don't care about anything outside of their immediate surroundings, for better or worse.

second, the barrier to entry for a web 2.0 company relative to a company that will organize the world's health, hunger,thirst, etc. is a few orders of magnitude lower.

I've got a few friends with prototypes for companies that could effect serious change on the scale Umair constantly references, but they'd need several millions of dollars before having something that's even ready for mass production.

(edit: these buddies of mine, will end up working for corporate america in non-innovative companies because they just don't have the resources to be able to take their prototypes and build them into companies. One of the guys would need about 18 months and 6 full-time research technicians/machinists.)

even with PG's "be good" it's debatable how much the majority of YC companies are going to have a positive impact on the world ... but then again, is that their aim?

maybe Fred, Umair, and a few other big players idea/operations/capital wise should start a YC to attack those very problems with young, hungry, entrepreneurs. $250-$500k per entrepreneur should be fairly reasonable to get to marketable prototype/ alpha version.
Okay, I think I get it now. You want the user to "stretch" the DOM element representing a schedule item, and then when the user is done stretching, you will translate the movement into a real start and end time.

To borrow MVC terminology, your DOM element is then effectively a controller + view in one. Just like we might translate a slider at 50% into 128/256, it's okay to take its properties and then translate those into your model. Presumably you poll the DOM object as it is being dragged, or fire off events when it stops being dragged, which updates the model in near-real-time. Do I understand it?

This is actually a good idea then. Although you want to be careful that your controller doesn't rely on magic constants to do its conversion, it should derive those from some initialization from something representing a "layout". But you seem to have done this.

To get back to your original question... I did find the code hard to read. I don't have the time to unravel it to make it clearer, but personally, I always like to state the problem as clearly as I can up front, in an expression that approaches pseudocode. Like "return getStartOfWeekTime(el) + getOffsetTime(el)". This hides away the hard bits in smaller routines, and the clueless maintenance programmer (i.e. you in one month) will understand what's going on right away and where the bugs might be. But if this is too slow you may have to bite the bullet and live with something hard to read.
What's your ADHD symptoms like?

I remember a period of my life where I would have to spend hours on a single page of a book because I wasn't able to retain anything. I should have went to the doctors about it.
Finances are a limiting constraint.

> My life goals? I want excitement (see ADHD, above).

Interesting article with a twist:
[http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/StockInvestin...]

Re: fear and finances, this presentation from Ignite Portland might alter your thinking: "Once upon a time, in the midst of war, I went to Afghanistan with one hundred dollars to my name, a one-way airplane ticket and no promise of a job." [http://is.gd/Bvc]

I would recommend doing what you fear. Growth comes from pushing yourself. As a contrived example, if talking to beautiful women scares you.. talk to strangers in controlled situations (art galleries, sporting events). One of the best ways to meet people is where you have continuity - e.g. you see them regularly. Some of the most interesting people I know are interesting because they know people of all interests, vertical groups. Join groups that you have an interest in but are not already skilled in. True networkers connect people who might never meet together.

Sometimes a personality test can help you learn more about who you are. People like to give advice but sometimes don't because it might offend inadvertently.. perhaps you can talk to someone who is known you for a long time and ask them for advice? This one linked below is expensive but better than the Myers-Brigg test.
http://www.kolbe.com
Exactly! And yes, all those "magic numbers" are derived. For example...

this.hSpacing = Array.prototype.slice.call(this.parent.blocks.filter(
function(n){ return n < _this.parent.cols; })
.map(function(n,o){ return o.offsetLeft; })
);

Your function names and decomposition are indeed much easier to read. Thanks again, Neal!
You should have more abstraction. Date handling code is rarely clear. Embedding it presentation code is rarely advisable. Calculate day of week in one function. Calculate time of day in another function then generate position based on these functions.
Fleeting thoughts, constantly. Spending a lot of time bringing myself back from mini-tangents inside the brain; in mid-sentence, distracted by thought/sight/sound/smell and hence lost train of thought (dozens of time a day).

I seem to do reading fine, but retain very little from the reading, in comparison with classmates. I've mostly been taking math-y classes (cs, math, phys). Physics was very difficult. Writing essays is even more difficult - this is the source of most of my academic troubles.
That's good to hear -- I ran a paper in college and it was an awesome experience. This is such a hugely transformational period in publishing that knowing the ins and outs of the business makes you aware of how many opportunities there are right now. My current startup is intended to help small magazines and campus publications establish an online presence and being able to draw on personal experience makes me way more confident in its ability to succeed.

But yeah, I was in a similar boat in terms of the ADHD and not fitting into the general party culture and everything kind of fell into place when I started focusing on doing stuff that was actually fun to do and not so much on stuff I assumed I was supposed to be doing (i.e., my homework).
yeah, it's a bad habit of mine that the people who run the companies we have invested in call me on all the time. i don't mean that we own the companies. but it certainly expresses the ownership we feel of the opportunities they are chasing
If you want to do the startup thing, notice people who are smart and more ambitious than you and spend your time hanging around with them.

If you want to have your pick of a quality corporate job and find your excitement elsewhere, build something tangible you can point to during an interview. It doesn't have to be complicated, it just has to indicate that you can accomplish something on your own.

Remember that becoming an expert in anything takes 10 years, so assuming you are around 20, think about what you would like to be an expert at when you are 30 and start working on it regularly.

Edit: One more thing -- college can be one of the last times in your life when it is trivial to make new friends. Make as many as you can, and try to hang onto the good ones after you graduate.
that's a good idea. i have certain responsibilities to our investors that i have to live up to. but a YC to change the world is a great idea
Heh, I didn't think my comment was going to generate this much discussion. Anyways, my point was that shy people have this weird thing where they tend to only say really nice, sugary things. It comes off a little odd (or so I've heard). So a good place to start is by biting your tongue less. Or something like that.