skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recall an infosec researcher used to have this as their signature. I'm not sure how to get google to help me find it though...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&as_qdr=all...
"In other words, it’s not that we claim to have glimpsed “a unicorn in the garden” – we have a whole population of them living in my lab! [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unicorn_in_the_Garden] And lest you accuse me further of fraud, I do not literally mean that we have unicorns in the lab. Rather, I am making a literary allusion. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allusion]"

Ha.
TechCrunch will cover people who don't break the silence through them, but they try to be a news site so they seem much more likely to cover a recent launch than an old launch.

You could always just have your sign up page check for news.ycombinator.com as the referrer if you wanted to expand your beta just to the HNN audience.
Devouring knowledge: step by step guide
Hmm.. I have to say I have had a very different experience being a fresh college grad (class of 2008). I applied for jobs at various different places, big companies and small startup's, in all different types of industries defense, finance, health and software.

I would say I hear back from companies I sent my resume to 75% of the time - and out of those companies, I eventually get offers 75% of the time. Salary typically hovers around 50-60K depending on location and the nature of job.

Oh and I did not graduate from a technical school - no certificates, and my degree in CS is not even a BS, it's a BA because I graduated from the liberal arts college. Your mileage may vary, that's all I am saying.
They didn't break any rules though. They just played the system.

I agree it was written a bit like you say though.
Very well stated cog........ The best artistic portrayal of how "leadership" works (in the software development anyways) was with the character "Blumberg" (or at least I think it was blumberg... something like that) in the movie "Office Space". He was the manager of the character played by Ron Livingston (or at least I think that was his name)........

Hilarious movie. I've watched it dozens of times, though not for a few years now and that's why I'm a little hazy on the names. But whenever anyone starts talking about leadership in this business Blumberg is the guy that pops to mind and that's just because after over 2 decades working in the industry he's the guy who best characterizes all the managers and supervisors I've had to work for.
Yep, but you still need to make a decision about which system you should be working in order to maximize whatever it is you're trying to maximize.

If you're trying to maximize wealth, iterating and failing fast is a much better way to do it as opposed to kissing middle-management ass, what's the point of working that system?
s/famed/infamous/
...which further proves my point that Ruby is a bad, bad platform choice for production applications right now. You just can't have this level of insecurity, sloppiness, and unresponsiveness among the developers in a platform you would use for serious applications. Maybe one day Ruby, Rails, et al. will be ready for prime time, but it's just not now, IMO.

update: by Ruby I mean the standard Matz codebase.
hey, being from Africa: Yes, you could,though i dont in 'aid' and charity in Africa we need to resolve our problems, only then will we learn how to compete in the global economy. So for example, encourage entreprenuership etc.

Take a look at the bigger picture being how do can you use your technology skills to programme/code something to make a difference? To assist with the issues being faced in Africa (And globally).

i.e The current inflation being felt world wide, the energy crisis(fuel / power), the food crisis with the high prices of food, in places like the US it does not affect people and even for some people like myself it will not affect me since i can afford the higher prices. However when it comes to people who can just barely pay for their daily food, it leads to starvation.

So yes, while we build 199999 Facebook(x) clone or silly little online app, millions of people out there are starving and can barely make ends meet.

Think about that.

There is a group created to put into action practical technology solutions to target some of these issues, feel free to join.

http://groups.google.com/group/technologyforchange
The point of business cards is to hand out as many as possible.
On the other hand, doing research in applied mathematics is great training for being a derivatives trader.

IT is a very broad industry and CS is very relevant to a significant subset of it.
Thanks, I think part of my problem is that I don't fully understand how TechCrunch works.

Do you think having invite codes are a good idea?
Any chance that it could be grey?
To quote myself, "unless your problem set happens to closely happens to overlap very closely to what it was designed for". If the GUI is the majority of your problem, then perhaps it's a great tool (I'd be hesitant to say it's the best tool, as I found it to be less pleasant to work with than, say, Python with one of its many GUI toolkits).

If you like it, and enjoy it, that's wonderful. I merely think the hyperbole in the OP title was pointless. Apple is not reshaping the web app developer landscape. (WebObjects didn't exactly set the world on fire, for example.)
This is intriguing. There is clearly a slow paradigm shift happening that makes Windows/Office less relevant and UNIX-like environments more and more relevant for end users. His terminology wasn't very convincing to me though (documents vs. streams) but that's just details.

I'd rather call it socialization of desktop computers, because the stream of emails, chats, feeds etc that are becoming increasingly important to us is a result of various kinds of virtual social networks we build.

So, if there's a niche for a killer socialization application, what would it look like? I'd imagine, as a random thought, a nice desktop front-end for the syslog, that shows all interesting events happening in the system: new emails, feed updates, software updates, stock market alerts, calendar/todo events etc. The user presumably uses this applet even more often than the FS shell, as objects the user is interested in are mostly opened through the syslog.
Ha! Thanks. Yea, I know what you are saying, and I am sure that something will come along. I am taking my A+ next week because every 'network engineer' position that I have applied for requires it - they do not, however, require a CS degree. Go figure. All I can do is use this time that I have and hone my hacking skills - something to be thankful for. Oh, and at the interview they said the waiter positions was filled, but they will call me about the busboy position! Yay!
Ask YC: Any hackers currently in Cairo?
I am and probably will be for a few months on-and-off. Would be cool to meet for drinks or some "co-hacking" somewhere by the river Nile or whatever. Sorry for the unusual thread.
Personally, I'm sick of the invite codes. I don't feel special and it has become so common.

Just do a soft launch here. If your app is good, it will spread. If you're hoping to get some special benefit from Techcrunch, beyond the initial burst of traffic, I think you'll be disappointed.

edit: Did a quick search on Google, this article might help you:
http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/169/Startups-Why-T...
Full-body keyboard.
+1 The current color led me to think it was part of the title.
Yea, I am going to spend this 'down time' honing my skills as a hacker and see what happens from there. As the old adage goes "the proof is in the pudding" and I currently don't have much in the way of 'pudding' to show prospective employers aside from my degree - guess I need to get to brainstorming.

Oh, and concerning moving: my wife is an accountant here and is clearing 60, so yea, not really an option... luckily she can support my broke-a for now.
Two whole books? Why, that's as much as .1 times the number of Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, or even Lisp books on the shelf at your average bookstore! Get ready world, here comes the Apple development juggernaut!

My comment was merely to point out the silliness of hyperbole. I'm not picking on Apple, or its fanboys. You like Apple products, and development tools that emulate Apple products, and that's wonderful for you. But, it doesn't alter the fact that Apple has historically had little to no impact on the web development world (web design, they've had a huge impact on...actual code, not so much).
When they were babes: Web 2.0's humble paper origins
Jason, It may sound harsh, but I'm pretty sure that you didn't learn any lesson from your failed startup - or learned the wrong ones.

1. Your target audience was not small.

2. Your lack of marketing had nothing to do with your failure.

3. There is nothing wrong with your technology choice.

4. Shared hosting wasn't the cause - you just chose a bad host.

5. It's possible to gain people's trust if you position yourself correctly, if your product looks legitimate enough, if you have enough word of mouth or buzz, and if your product is just plain good.

6. Gmail didn't kill Waifmail. There is plenty of room for competition in mail.

I may be completely wrong, but from reading your post, my guess is that:

1. You gave up too quickly.
2. You weren't able to estimate what users would want correctly or at all. Or, you weren't dedicated to figuring it out.
3. You couldn't execute the idea correctly, either with design and/or code.
4. As a result of not understanding your user, you weren't able to keep innovating.
4. You weren't able to understand your user because your vision wasn't exactly right
NBC: Our Shows Are Big Hits, Online
Good job Mr. Gates. C/o 2008 and already getting 60K offers from 75% of your applications. You are a fortunate fellow. Unfortunately the tech jobs here in the southeast U.S. (Alabama to be specific) aren't so hot - avg <40k starting. And before you said 'move', see above comment. Thanks for the feedback though.
Yeah I don't really care about the traffic. I just though that if TC didn't cover your launch first, they would ignore you forever.

Thanks for that link, that is some good advice.
freebsd apparently agrees with you. They back ported the security fixes instead of syncing up with the latest version.

http://www.freshports.org/lang/ruby18/

Maybe this is a lesson not to blindly use ruby without going through a trusted distributor. Not unlike linux?
There may be some truth to that. Don't lose your one opportunity to do it right.
Well, quantum is applicable - or at least becoming so. A.I. is another one that springs to mind - not to mention robotics. Everyone loves robots.
The Art of the Job Offer: Encourage Candidates to Turn You Down
The Networked battlefield from a grunt's point of view
On a late summer night of 2004 in al Anbar province, Iraq, just south of Abu Ghraib, an observation post of four Marines was shot at briefly from the shadows...
I guess my comment seemed, somehow, to be praising Java. Java is a setting sun, and becomes increasingly irrelevant in web apps by the day. The JVM, on the other hand, might turn out to be very relevant, due to the increasing number and quality of dynamic languages that run on the JVM. And the JVM is not something that can be claimed to have lineage from Objective C (since ObjC has no VM).

Anyway, I just think the hyperbole is way out of place. Apple is not going to dramatically alter the web app development landscape. Some people (mostly people who've built Apple desktop apps) will find Objective-J a more comfortable way to build web apps, and that's wonderful. But it's not a world-shaking thing.
It Once Rained on Mars
"2. Impossible to gain users' trust"

HN,
Is this a pervasive problem you guys are having with your app?
If so, how do you build user trust?

"5. Really sad marketing"

Hmm...I would have leveraged my communities for feedback, and ask them to spread the word if they like it.

"6. Small target audience"

I remember DHH encouraging the community to focus on tiny markets.
http://omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hansson-...
Facebook in legal fight for its future
Hmm, not sure about that. Taking a arbritrary threshold of $500k a year, I have friends who earn that on boards of FTSE250 companies - there are maybe 2,500 of those jobs just in the UK (10 per company). At the top end exec compensation hits $40m+ which is equal to a huge startup cash out.

How many startup founder positions are there that pay over $500k a year? How many $40m+ wins are there per year?

Writing off the corporate route to weath might be a mistake, there are too many factors just to dismiss something as black and white. By the time you start considering risk, competitors and everything else it gets very complicated indeed. The fact that it isn't something you want to do personally doesn't make it a bad choice for everyone.
Digital Forensics: How Experts Uncover Doctored Images
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=digital-image-forensics
Reminds me of SEOs who bitch whenever Google changes the ranking algorithm. Try a non-parasitic business model for a change.
Yep. And it might also make sense to move "scribd" link to the end, e.g. -

The First Report on Scheme Revisited (brics.dk) (scribd)

But that's nitpicking really. The change is great as is. Kudos to pg for listening to the whiners like myself :)
I'm working on tag search. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227184 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227932

Tags: [search] [tagging] [meta]
You can work with others. Develop point-of-sale software to improve efficiency at crowded stores. Cell phone software can make markets more efficient and prevent price-setting that farmers suffer from. Then there's medical records software.

All of these 1) require some domain expertise, even if small 2) are conceptually simple, but the delivery is hard
ASk HN: Anyone working on hardware for his/her startup?
99.99 percent of startups mentioned here are working on software products . I am sure there are a few of us who are creating hardwares. Could you please come fwd if you do not mind and share your concept, challenges etc...?
Typically, for a recent CS graduate they get equated in the initial search for a job - put CS, put IT, put 6, put 'half a dozen'... in the end, when seeking that first job that gives you your experience that all the "good" jobs require, the HR manager does not know (or could care less) about the differences between CS or IT.

Basically, to most 'regular' employers they need a "tech guy" (or girl) who generally understands the domain of their needs. Or maybe I am applying for crap jobs - who knows? But I do know that typically when "cold" applying for positions, the two are usually considered equivocal.
The "extraneous" pages were actual slides.

I'm with you on the bad first impression of FlowGram, though.
MSU researcher creates system helping police to match tattoos to suspects
The race is on: Get your own Internet [top-level] domain
The author, who was in the Marines for 12 years and served in Iraq, brings up a few very interesting points about how the chain of command and tactics have been impacted by the Internet and electronic devices.
Y Combinator News Tag Cloud
Congrats but remember deals fall through.
If you lower the trade barriers you will get a chance to buy the things they make and they will get a chance to make what we want.

The reality of africa is that Europe dumps a lot of it's produce into African markets at below market prices reducing the value of the local goods. There is no point in giving to charity until this stops. African countries don't want charity, they want markets and foreign capital so they can grow jobs for THEIR people.
We're in a similar situation and we've put together a checklist of stuff that has to be ready for the launch. Since we started putting it in concrete terms the amount of stuff was more than we suspected. :-)

Things included were:

- Essential bugs that must be fixed

- Essential info that must be on the web site, including, as we're B2B an outline of our customer integration process

- List of press contacts and places we want to announce

- Press release text in English and German (we're based in Germany)

Since the launch does give you a chance at making some noise, while it's important not to delay, I think it's also important not to do it when you're not ready for a bit of a spotlight if you get lucky enough to generate some attention.
I will miss the top comment on every submitted pdf being the link to the original pdf, followed by the pro vs anti-scribd debate.
I believe most of these potential deals fall through. If you spend a ton of money on an M&A attorney every time someone mentions acquisition, you're screwed.
Once, I had been dating a girl for a bit, and in one of the dates I was telling her about the distances between stars, and how there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand in the earth.
And at some point I was trying to explain her 2001 A Space Odyssey, and the meaning behind the monoliths. --which is pretty fascinating to any person that has some geekiness inside.

She was totally bored.

Then I switched into how Rome is awesome, and Instabul was a romantic place, cools things to do in Europe blah blah.... a little bit more interesting to her as she had never travelled in europe.

I quit dating her after that night. I was "sick" for a while, then in "Boston" for a long time....

I just couldn't date a person with that low level of curiosity.

Anyways, you would be suprised on how layman might be totally un-interested to even these cosmical events. Something it is just beyond some people, it is like foreing stuff, that they don't need to understand, and trying to understand will only give them headaches.

Moral of the story: When dating, never trade intelligence for beauty. You will regret it as soon as the eye candy wears off.
Research in Motion misses first quarter earnings
ANN = artificial neural network, if that was unclear :)
Tags: [irritating] [extra] [redundant]
I have never been in the situation having never launched something, but if I was launching, I would be inclined to just post the link here.

Best case, people here love it. Worst case people will point out its failings and be critical. This is actually a good thing, as it gives you the information you need to vastly improve it.

Most likely outcome is that some people like it and some hate it, but either way you will get good, honest and helpful feedback on here ...
1. Identify Your Audience.
See where your audience/community hangs out whether it be blogs/forums/social networking sites or parties.

2. Build Trust.
Engage the that community and build their TRUST by helping them out. No one likes a weasel or troll.

3. Ask and you shall receive.
Community feedback is paramount. You'll be surprised how much help they'll give you.

4. Organic Growth.
The community will launch the site for you since you have already established an authentic relationship and it's a product that they like.

5. Press on and learn.
Don't get discouraged and follow your passion. Life is full of lessons for you to learn.

Good Luck!!

Nick
Software that could be useful to Zimbabwe's government... that's an interesting challenge.

How about a Google Maps mashup that allows government goons to share notes on where opposition leaders are hiding?
It takes a lot to get a big ol dog to roll over on the couch, but it doesnt take much more to get him to move to the floor. The threshold to justify any change does mean that small changes aren't "worth it," especially when you consider that there may be a maximum amount of changes that people can tolerate at once. The view of an overworked/overextended/normal executive is, to some extent, one of triage.
s/company/X
A shame sciam gutted the article:

The methods of spotting fake images discussed in the boxes...

There are no boxes.
This is either genius or completely stupid. I can't decide. I'm erring for the former.

Probably this article tells the truth, but not the whole truth.
This is something that appears to be poorly understood in the tech/computer industry. Superb software design skills aren't as important in areas with serious social and infrastructure problems.

Also, to some extent, I think that those that have recently spoken out against foreign aid in Africa are correct: only Africa can improve Africa's well-being. (I say this even as a former member of a local community organization that raised funds to send an experienced hydrologist to Uganda for a year to work on water quality there.)
I still can't figure out why people had C++. None of the arguments seem all that convincing to me.

It has a significant niche, and fills it well, as far as I'm concerned. When I think of languages I hate, I think of Forth or BASIC, not C++.
I disagree. If your app is useful, and you get a good userbase, they'll mention you soon enough if there is a competitor, or related company, or you do something new/cool/etc.
set up a private beta email invitewall for your site with a basic paragraph explaining what your site does, spam this everywhere you can and collect as many emails as you can.

set up a subdomain to redirect to your site and post it here. kill said subdomain after 3-5 days and tweak based on feedback.

in the mean time pitch to techcrunch (mashable is worthless in terms of coverage) through their email system, twitter links, and their forum. if it's interesting they will pick it up, though michael arrington probably won't be the one writing it up.

just go ahead and launch. email everyone on your mailing list. send the links to everyone you know. browse through blogs and whenever something related to your product is mentioned make a mention of it in the comments. techcrunch doesn't make or break you.
I brainstorm a lot, and I like to bounce ideas off my fellow engineers. I've found the most effective stratety to getting buy-in is 1) awareness -- usually via link sharing 2) conversation around the lunch table -- weeds out 85% of ideas 3) more conversation, this time during meetings, where the positive of X is brought up in contrast to what happenes now and then, finally 4) proposal. Slow and steady wins the race. You don't want to trigger people's fight or flight response.
Amen. CS is basically a branch of applied mathematics, and is interesting enough. But it doesn't even remotely approach the kind of profundity you see in the basic sciences. I went through college as a physics major, changing to CS at the end basically to be sure I could get a job. And I've regretted that ever since, constantly explaining to people that I'm really more of a scientist by training.

But that said, the practice of science, at a day to day level, doesn't even remotely approach the level of satisfaction you get from a good hack.
No, I just thought it was pretty cool it used all these YC companies' products.
How to take Better Naps
Conclusion. If you do not want to be executed, be(come) a woman with a high school diploma or at least a GED.
What's your contact info? Let's get in touch.
TECH4FRICA 2008 - A web and emerging technology conference for Africa
Instead of jumping out of an airplane ...
List of Free Online Ruby Books
>2 Receive real time updates of cool links shared by people you like

How do you handle a link that gets sent to the same person by two people? What about a link that you yourself sent? Can it be 'sent back' by somebody that you follow, that doesn't follow you (i.e., they don't know that you've already seen it)? I'm kind of thinking of situations where, i.e., person 1 'watches' person 2, 2 watches 3, 3 watches 1, and a, b, c, ... z watch 1, 2 and 3, and it makes me think of that 'Bedlam DL3' story Larry Osterman wrote about a while ago (http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2004/04/08/109626.aspx).

I mean, won't this cause a lot of duplicate / unnecessary traffic through the server and possibly to clients? Or are you doing it in some other way than how I'm thinking?