skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I don't think I'll be posting any other writing of any kind to news.yc. I've already made a fool of myself on here."

That's exactly the opposite of what I was hoping for.

Decide which feedback is helpful and which is not, use it, adapt, write some more, and keep us posted. That's how you get better. Don't let a few slow you down. And if you're worrying about looking like a fool, you're in the wrong place and the wrong field - go to class. (I already know you've made it this far by following your passion no matter what - why stop now?)

See you here soon.
Exploring Wide Finder
Hummer Shutdown - What Will Arnold Drive Now?
He makes a point of "[compressing] (to the highest point possible)" all his images but doesn't bother to gzip the actual html.

His site's layout is so trivial that it could be implemented in 4 divs, and they would render cross browser no problem, not to mention, easily styled so that the menu and content are inlined vertically when rendering on a small 80px phone screen.

Also, there is no indication whatsoever as to what is a link, this is just plain bad usability.
I have never met Denny, but I really like his articles.

Added him to the list of people I would like to meet if I am in the U.S. and we are able to :)
Oh my God Contra what is the matter with you? :-P
I think they need to decide whether they want to be a personal blog for Arrington's uninformed self-injection or real journalism. Right now, I think they're pretending to the latter while operating as the former.
This is a great posting about how the author determined what he was most comfortable with and what worked for his needs.

Do what works best for you and what you are comfortable with.
You're absolutely right, I never really thought to even try this.
I met up with him a few times while he was CEO of Gigamon, he came to our office when I was exploring setting up a reseller arrangement for the Giga-VUE (which is a kick-ass networking device).
Man, and I was thinking I was one of the "good" programmers....
Did you already read this? I spent 12 years at MIT (4 as student, 8 as employee) and agree with the advice:

http://web.mit.edu/visit/
File Systems versus Database Management Systems
Why would that be motivation in the first place? The contracts have a minimum run-time of 2 years, so Apple wins even if you pop a different SIM in the phone.
Yes, and if you really would rather have the money eBay is about to become well stocked with alternative, slightly-used iPhones for you at really good values.
Using a Data Dictionary
I'm working for a large corporation right now and can definitely see the demand for Web 2.0 in business, especially in communication tools and Software-as-a-Service.
Dang, did I end up on "tech gadget news" again? I totally meant to to Hacker News. I am not good at the internets ...
Some Thoughts on Word of Mouth
iddqd didn't seem to work. At least, I don't feel anything yet.
Im not good in programming, but i love cats, i love monthy python and the hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy and i love music and photography. I guess some of those stuff are just signs that you have some qualities that good hackers have. They don't make you good, practice and hard work makes you good. Something that's been troubling me is that my weirdness is much bigger than my actual programming skills and i felt like i haven't earned my privilege to be that kind of person. So I've been working on my coding skills harder lately and i hope to earn my right to be weird and arrogant an annoying to people that bore me, now im just some confused kid :D "attitude is no substitute for confidence" said someone wise(don't remember where I've read it) So if you think that you can go to an interview and act like some weirdo cat lover, you better be able to back up your self with some mad skills :D
Yes, I read the general advice, but I was looking for some specific details, if you think there could be anything that is useful other than what is mentioned on that page.
The 5MP camera does also smile detection...

Waiting for "funny moment detector", "a la Bresson genius shot detector" and of course "reddit top story detector".

Seriously, it has always been practically impossible to compete with Apple with products that simply copy them. If you want to kill^H^H^H^H compete with iPhone, do something really different.
I assume that the taxes on the plan will go up as well.
They should have... That mockup is lightyears better than my bank's site.
Five things we want from the next iPhone
I don't read Techcrunch unless someone points me to a story that sounds like it might be interesting which is rare. However, people seem to read, and their traffic hasn't suffered, so I doubt that the site is going to change anything soon. For that matter, who cares what Techcruch is writing about. By moaning about it here, we're giving it airtime that could be used for something more useful. Ignore it, and perhaps others will too over time (or they'll change their focus).

Yes, the site has influence, but to think it's the only way to get noticed is only adding fuel to the fire.
Are Google, Yahoo the next dinosaurs?
"Free (arguably) open CIL, languages, document format, IDE, documentation."

Actually, Visual Studio Express doesn't even include a profiler, IIRC. The profiler is included only in the much more expensive enterprisey Visual Studio team edition (or whatever the hell it's called). All of Apple's developer tools are completely free and come with OS installation DVDs. Apple's compilers are based on gcc, and, per terms of the GPL, Apple's patches are sent back to gcc's maintainers.

"Meanwhile 4000 devs are going to make ALL the applications that the masses could ever want on an iPhone."

Where did you get this idea? 4000 people are in the beta, and there is no reason to believe that Apple won't let absolutely anyone on Earth develop iPhone apps as soon as the SDK reaches its final release.

"Heck, why isn't it free to push open source projects?... It seems like they have it out for open source / small business / hackers."

The iPhone App Store is free of charge to developers who choose to release free software, so I have no idea what you're complaining about. The store also lets independent developers set their own pricing. If you don't like that you can't just zap apps from iPhone to iPhone, (1) that's mainly done for safety reasons, and (2) you actually can, with the ad hoc signing mechanism discussed in WWDC keynote.
I like cats, percussion, and certain kinds of absurd humor. Even humor as absurd as Ren and Stimpy sometimes. I'm curious if anyone else enjoyed Ren and Stimpy back in the day, since I've found it to be somewhat polarizing (you either loved it or you thought it was the most disgusting crap you'd ever seen).
Wow, the wayback machine is in effect!

The 37Better series was from back when we used to do client work. Every once in a while we'd run into a bad experience with a site we used. An online bank, FedEx, PayPal, etc.

So, as one-part experiment, one-part promotion, and one-part just plain fun, we'd redesign one (or a couple) pages to show what we'd do with the concept/site if we had the chance.
http://boston.openguides.org/?Mary_Chung's :) Be careful if you don't like spicy food, though.

That's my only specific advice, since I know nothing about AI.

General advice: Get introduced to a grad student, and have them introduce you to other grad students, until you find one that can run down the list of professors and tell you how each one's research is really going. In my experience, third or fourth-year grad students -- who often have friendly peers scattered throughout the university, who have spent much time comparing life in one research group to life in another, and who know where to find good beer at reasonable prices -- are the ones who are most likely to give you glimpses of the cold, hard facts, instead of merely a beautifully crafted line of funding-agency-ready marketing copy. If all you do is look at hallway posters and chat with profs, you won't learn anything that you can't learn from reading journal articles or attending a conference in your field.

If you're interested in applications of AI, consider trying to find some local companies (the letters "ITA" come to mind here... to say nothing of "iRobot") and asking them for "informational interviews". From the sound of your CV, companies might well be willing to have someone spend an hour talking to you, just on spec. Be prepared to detach them politely if they cling to your leg and beg you to join the technical staff.
I immediately stopped reading this article when they referred to Google and Yahoo! as "desktop brands", and completely reaffirmed my stance that major news outlets do a HORRIBLE job of reporting on Technology aside from a few stand out columnists.
> By moaning about it here, we're giving it airtime that could be used for something more useful. Ignore it

yes, sorry. I'm slightly horrified that my rant is #1 on HN. In a nice way though.
If he ended up choosing PHP, this thread would be full of hate. Since his choice is python, everyone is happy :-)
I am bursting with excitement!

Don't take this the wrong way, but for whatever reason, I immediately thought of Monty Python's "My nipples explode with delight" sketch (http://youtube.com/watch?v=04S03wDrtSo).
Can Intellectual Property be Monetized? HBS Thinks So.
Trivial JavaScript
TechCrunch needs a comment system like the one used here @ hackernews.

It will then be more fun.
Writing ECMAScript 4, Today
Ask HN: How to keep organized and on target
I just left the startup I was working for, and for the foreseeable future I will be doing some contracting to pay the bills and working on my own software.

I will be working from home for both, and in order to handle all of this I would like to become more organized and methodical than I usually am (and is usually required).

So specifically, any suggestions on tools:

-dealing with everything about the company, from tax receipts, business cards to keeping to a dev schedule

-handling everything for the contracting, from tracking the number of billable hours to details from a phone call about a project

I have a reasonable idea of how I can handle this - but this community always surprises me with really helpful information about these type of things.

Any other advice will also be helpful, this is day 1 so the list of things I need to do is pages long!
DiCaprio Signs On to Portray Atari Creator
* But, in real programming, you spend 80-90% of your time [...]*

Well, yeah. But the question was about text editors -- how do you optimise that 10% of your time when you're actually cutting code? My point was, ultra-terse command syntax like vi's don't amount to much if what you're really typing is;

arr(<back>[3<back>2];<back>

to get the string

arr[2]

into your source code. Also, typing matters more in dynamic languages or uncompiled source like html, where spelling mistakes can go undetected more easily.

The real benefits, as you note, are in things like automatic intellisense-style function- and class-lookups, easy integration with source control and documentation and refactoring/lint tools, and ease of navigating the call graph.

The big win, obviously, is live IE and firefox previewing ;) http://www.sublimetextwiki.com/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/BrowsersPlug...
They are in the news business and need to make entertaining stories. I don't see the big deal - all news outlets try to make as much drama as possible, and Arrington seems to be good with words. It's the way of the news.
Ask HN: What about applying Comet to Hacker News?
Hi All,

Just a thought: YC News is a "live" application that updates constantly, what do you thing on using Comet to push the updates to the page while it's active?
I have drunk Python's kool aid and i am stuck on it
Apple Mac OS X Snow Leopard information
I'm almost never touching the mouse.

Isn't this true for absolutely every programmer's text editor? Be it vi, emacs, visual studio, eclipse, whatever -- find an editor which can't do everything via the keyboard, and you've probably not got a real programmer's text editor.

What's particularly special about vi?
My personal alternative is to read Javascript: The Good Parts and just get better at Javascript.

I don't see the sense in adding a fiddly, potentially fragile additional layer of code to the client side -- to say nothing of tying myself to Microsoft -- just so that I can use Ruby syntax instead of Javascript syntax. Yeah, I like Ruby, but it's not like Ruby is some kind of massive feature or performance win. It might be different if the browser only supported assembly language, or FORTRAN, but Javascript is pretty nice.

I mean, what's next? A Python port of jQuery to run in your Python-enabled Silverlight application? Don't we have something better to do?
Loyal to Its Roots
An interesting thought, but I personally believe that the small size of HN doesn't justify implementing Comet.
Now, that sounds pretty nice. This must need language-specific definitions -- a block in python is delimited differently than C, say.

What different things can you refer to? I know you can refer to words, lines, characters, buffers, and now blocks. Any other types?
This really struck me, since I'm so accustomed to thinking of plants as little more than scenery and nutrition. However, when you think about it, it's obvious that plants should exhibit very complicated behaviors, since they've been evolving for so long. I just never really thought about it.
In my case, this has just happened (about 8 months ago).

I'll add some bullet points:
- I'm still in good spirits and not destitute.

- Out of the last 5 employees, the majority are still friends, including my partner in the venture. This seems to be rare to me, but perhaps not.

- I am in a significant amount of personal debt. We did a few personal guaranteed items from the LLC, and now I'm stuck with paying them, including corporate credit card debt. The debt occurred when we were being a little irrational about survival in the last 6 months. It was easy to do because we were being led on a little by a big client. Overall, this debt is going to keep me poor for a while and limits my new startup options some (but not a lot).

- The money invested by my family, friend, and contacts is now completely lost. Software startups really have very few assets worth a damn afterwards. I think most of them are OK with it, but they aren't happy with it, and likely wont loan/invest money again anytime soon. In other words, most of my potential startup cash pool has dried up for future startups.

- I have an immense knowledge now of what it takes to make a business, a software project, a success, and some huge pitfalls that we hit that we can avoid next time. Hiring pitfalls are the most costly and damaging, especially when they are programmers. Good programmers, on the other hand, can basically save a company almost single handedly. We had one of each; unfortunately the good came too late.

- Immediately after we closed, I was terribly unmotivated to do anything. Partly I think this comes with being burned out. I wouldn't call it depression, but it wasn't far from that. I drank too much, and really didnt do much except sometimes try to find a job and watch movies. Luckily I had some investments that I sold that could sort of pay for my worthlessness during this time.

- Slowly I came out of that pseudo-depression, and I am now collecting my ideas, plans for a new startup. This time I'm taking things a little slower. I know I will hire employees a lot later, and look for investment a lot later. That means the business will take longer to get running and gain traction, and will be a side-project to my job for longer, but I don't have much choice monetarily. I think it will benefit me in the end.

- I wouldn't trade my experience for debt reduction -- What I went through was kind of a form of an MBA crash course, and I think the experience will be highly valuable in the future.

Hope this helps.
Comet to Reddit ? :)
Not especially. It's mostly just an urban-rural thing.
Bedpost Hack
This is great - can you drop me an email at wschroter at yahoo so I can follow-up?
mechanical_fish's mention of Mary Chung's reminds me that you might want to contact the SIPB about other interesting computer-related things to see. If you're there on a Monday night you might sit in on the meeting (probably brief in July) and go to Mary Chung's with them after.
the 10 dollars a month covers the difference between 3G and edge.
Y Combinator Dataset Of Posts And Users Version 1.4
A 111MB archive of Y Combinator posts is available by accessing http://www.rushy.com/ycombinator-news20080610.tar.gz and a 0.8MB archive of Y Combinator user profiles is available by accessing http://www.rushy.com/ycombinator-news-profile20080610.tar.gz
I wrote my first program in QBasic (!) Somehow I ended up with a floppy disk which contained the game nibbles. I was playing around with the computer and realized I could look at the source code. Then I started messing around; I wrote a guitar tuner, and a quiz program.

Seems like the biggest hurdle will be getting them interested and thinking for themselves (for example, if you ask them to write whatever kind of program they want, how the heck are they going to know what's possible?)
this looks great.

perhaps now linkedin or any of the professional social networking sites like it can send out free business cards w/ linkedin-specific information printed on them for freelancers or networkers to give out at meeting, shows, conventions, etc.
International Address Fields in Web Forms
Does Apple's Steve Jobs have cancer again?
Not anymore. I watched a full episode on Comedy Central last night.
Getting Real online book (2006?) is php too: http://gettingreal.37signals.com/toc.php
An Inside Look at Y Combinator
Kickstart, Young entrepreneurs can get up to 2.6 million in grants
Get MAD at Your Digital Debris
Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab
This is actually just meta-babble about this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=213375
I tried idkfa but I still don't have the BFG on my desk...
Or maybe he's just getting older?
zfs is nice
Whether true or not, IMHO this is not appropriate to publish or discuss publicly. It is his private matter and only tabloids would publicize that for their own gain.
World’s Fastest Computer | Tech Jaws
Is Google App Engine blocking PayPal?
Two Cardinal Sins of REST API Design: Lessons you can Learn from the NewsGator REST API
Go Green -- Buy a Used Car. It's Better Than a Hybrid
Systemtap vs Dtrace Comparison
The software is certainly capable but the incredibly baroque interface is a huge turn-off to me. It also doesn't integrate with a lot of the tools I use in my workflow. There's probably a good opportunity here to create something which blows the competition out of the water.
Thanks.

I am sure at some point I'll find it useful or find a use for it :)
I can see both arguments. If you are a shareholder you are entitled to know anything that may impact your earnings. There are certain conditions people should be aware of, I am not too sure cancer is one of them.

Imagine a politician was schizophrenic, wouldn't you want to know that before you voted for him?
UTF-8: The Secret of Character Encoding
Try your hand at monetary policy with the Fed Chairman game
Erlang basic distributed application using gen_server and mnesia
Seriously, can someone please tell me why banks have such terrible interfaces? They have soo much money, they could blow it out of the water...

Take ING Direct for example. Their service rocks, I absolutely love it... but I loathe their interface, it makes me hesitant to refer to my aging family members.
42 Rules For Your First Week at the New Job
Fact check in aisle zero. Microsoft's CLR profiler is freely downloadable, no linkage to IDE versions. Additionally, there are two tiers of VS above Express, Professional and Team Suite (VSTS). VSTS comes in different editions, it's a bit convoluted but mostly irrelevant because most folks doing this for a living have an MSDN subscription (or they should, as it pays for itself pretty quickly just for dev/test licences). Collectively, these tools are frequently used to build mission-critical software for large corporations, which is probably the largest difference between MSFT's developer stack and APPL's.
What makes anyone think 3G costs more to operate than edge? As I understand it 3G is more bandwidth efficient than edge which makes it able to serve more bits and handle more calls with fewer towers. Presumably consumption will rise a bit with faster page loads, but I don't think they'll be installing 50% more towers to justify the 50% price hike on data. Can I leave my iPhone 3G in edge mode (we saw the slider) and not pay the extra $10? I doubt it.

Calling the extra $10 a 3G upgrade is one more bit of mirror in the smoke.
yeah, the fact of the matter is that vehicles evolved into heavy, feature-laden apartments-on-wheels. however, they also evolved much higher quality safety standards.

the more stuff you put into a vehicle, the heavier it will become, and the more gas it will take to make it go.

you can buy an old civic and get 50 to 60 MPG, but you won't have power anything, and if you get hit by a driving-their-SUV-going-90-while-cell-phone-texting sorority girl, you're going to be dead.

just commenting on the price of progress, not making a judgment in either direction.
That's a good idea, probably better than the way I have gone. If I personally knew anyone with a jailbroken iPhone and I saw that the process of loading and running was wrinkle free I might do it. I've recently spent far too much time wrestling strange build and run environments to want to get involved in another. At least my work on the algorithm suite has improved my understanding of the problem and possibly my solution. Time spent wrestling with a platform is mostly lost.
Maybe he got the fat stressed out of him a-la Peter Jackson after the LOTR movies.
would be the baddest mother fucker with cancer I know.
Here's the thing. I think most of us here are rational enough to not degrade into raw fanboy-ism (is that asking too much?). If Apple didn't keep knocking the ball out of the park while simultaneously facing a competition that seems utterly incapable of making an adequate response, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Sometimes I wonder if Apple's real brilliance is in carefully choosing which segments of a market to attack... perhaps they have an incompetence detector?

It's not like open source projects like OpenMoko haven't had a chance to make an amazing phone. Indeed, I'm frustrated because before the iPhone announcement, the OpenMoko looked like a top-of-the-line sort of gadget, and then Apple leapfrogs all their efforts on the first try. But I want a great phone, so now I'm stuck with AT&T and buying an iPhone.

If these independent "great products" want to compete, perhaps they need to start forming explicit alliances with other service providers to form an integrated solution that people want. It's very clear that at least the Apple-buying public wants that kind of integration.
Bionic hand wins top tech prize
Behavioral iPhone Pricing
He's not a politician and we don't have the opportunity to vote for him, so that's not much of an analogy.

There are laws about how much a publicly-traded company needs to disclose, and I'm pretty sure that the health of its CEO isn't on the list.

On the other hand, since it is kinda important to the future of the company and the industry, I can't see any point in making it a taboo topic for the rest of us to discuss.
HTC Touch Diamond Competes with iPhone | Tech Jaws
Games consoles are pretty closed

Don't remind me :(

That's one of the biggest obstacles to independent innovation in gaming today. The PC is the current bastion of the small developer but PC gaming itself is in decline. We need more open access to the console space.
If you are a shareholder you do get the opportunity to vote for him. I'm not familiar with the laws, just playing devil's advocate here.

CEOs come and go so one should ideally be investing in the company, unfortunately that is not the case.
Microsoft's standards bid stalled
Strands Introduces Amazon-like Recommendation Engine