skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's what worked for me when I was working for the man:

Pick an evening sometime this week. Tell people you're not going to be available. Ask your SO to go out with friends or something. I'd grab a quick bite after work, go home to an empty apartment. Close the blinds, dim the lights. Turn off my cell phone, turn off the wifi on my laptop. Put on a playlist of music that puts me in a good, happy, mellow mood. Poor myself a glass of wine, and settle down in front of the computer.

And just program. Don't worry about getting the code just right. Don't worry about business logic, unit tests, or what might happen if the user clicks the wrong thing at the wrong time. Just program. Make the computer do something cool, just because you can.

Who cares if it won't scale? Who cares if there's no business use case? Who cares if people won't pay for it?

Forget all that. That's work. You won't be able to program after work if you make it work. It has to be different. It has to be fun.
anyone else noted that lively uses facebook account as default?

http://www.lively.com/help/bin/answer.py?answer=98532&sr...
The moral issue can be separated out. The issue for me is just the liability. He notes that he did not seek legal advice.
Though I am a lowly Python noob, I'll tell you it's generally very bad practice to use a mutable as a default argument value. The reason is that a function's default is only ever initialized once. Case in point:

>>> def f(l=[]):
... l.append(0)
... print l
...
>>> f()
[0]
>>> f()
[0, 0]
>>> f()
[0, 0, 0]

Unless you 1) actually want the appearance of a 'static' local variable or 2) are really careful to make a copy of the mutable before messing around with it, you'll get yourself into trouble.
Doesn't stuff like this belong on Digg instead of here?
Hugs for Hackers
It seems similar in london, I went to the london techcrunch meetup a few weeks ago and quite a few of the people there were ex-banking.
> I have a tentative work entitled "Why PG is wrong about the color of the HN menubar,"...

You get to disagree about the menubar color at 250+ karma.
Fantastic to hear about these kinds of things. I wish more companies would "get" the idea that happy employees work better, and therefore making them happy is an investment, not a cost.

Then again, if they did that, maybe I wouldn't be so damn determined to make it independently!
Agreed. I have been highly disappointed and unsatisfied with most of the tech meetups I have attended. The large majority of attendees I have met at the events are merely non-hackers with an "idea for a website."
We're working on it already: streamfocus.com :)
Maybe - if that seems to be the consensus I'll gladly delete this submission.

My thinking was that there is at least some applicability since Reddit is a YCombinator company
Reddit started in Boston. Although, it may have originally been conceived in Charlottesville (back me up here Alexis?). Regardless, not a Brooklyn start-up.

I'm down for NYC YC gatherings.
I live in Brooklyn (Williamsburg) and I know there is a lot of start-up activity around me as well. It's easy to build a web app, but building a beautiful web app requires some incredibly artistic and design-conscious people which I think NYC (and especially Brooklyn) are chock full of.
It's not down for everyone, but very down for me.
I get

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Reference #97.67e434d.1215563367.2d56563
This gentleman managed: www.ams.sunysb.edu/~frey/Biographical/Resume_RJFrey_20060907_11.pdf
I have this gut feeling that Google recently acquired some company that was already doing all of this stuff. Although I can't tell who, and TC doesn't hint towards anyone.

Regardless, this service isn't all that new. There are lots of characters created in the summer 2007 timeframe linked from the Catalog page (like http://www.lively.com/catalog/details?mid=-84971956863432942...).
As an emacs user who is only slightly familiar with vim, I've wondered whether this may reflect a weakness of vim. With emacs + SLIME or even just dabbrev (included in emacs by default), you don't type the whole word anyway - you type an abbreviation and expand it. Does vim not have an equivalent capability? If not, that would explain why pg thinks abbreviated names are a win.
TechCrunch's secret Digg army
> Extraneous spaces annoy me to end.

It is recommended in the "official" python style guide to surround the assignment operator with a single space:
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/
I did a dig on www.reddit.com, reddit has moved to using CDN services from Akamai, and you guys probably caught the page during the dns propagation.

----------------------------------------------------------------

:~ p$ dig www.reddit.com

;; ANSWER SECTION:

www.reddit.com.	15	IN	CNAME	reddit.com.edgesuite.net.

reddit.com.edgesuite.net. 18984	IN	CNAME	a659.b.akamai.net.

a659.b.akamai.net.	20	IN	A	203.101.62.16

a659.b.akamai.net.	20	IN	A	203.101.62.10
because "getting it" is required to use it well

This is true of Python also. I don't "get" Python, and you can bet any Python I'd write would be crap.

In order to use a programming langauge, you actually have to learn it. Then you have to use it (to determine what you don't know), and then learn that too. Repeat.

There is no magical "I can understand it without learning" programming language. So any criticism of Perl for this reason applies to every other programming language.
I like the "screenshot grabbing" tab :)

(I would add something of more substance, but nothing else can really be said about this)
It could be a wave returning after he published quite a few in a short batch of time recently. Also I've felt that the newer ones aren't as convincing as some of the older essays.
Distributed Development
Excellent analysis ragan. But I would be even more succinct. Microsoft plus yahoo is still just dumb ol' microsoft and the combination is going to have no more success against Google than microsoft alone or yahoo and microsoft separately.

Microsoft was once king but something called Google came out of nowhere to steal it's thorny crown. When Google loses it's crown it will be from something that comes out of nowhere again.

Get working guys. It could be one of you.
Hm, reddint isn't down for me. What am I doing wrong?
As others said: Introduction to the Theory of Computation, by Michael Sipser

Together with Shai Simonson's lectures:

http://aduni.org/courses/theory/
What have you built? And what conference are you attending in Canada?
Yeah. So is VIM. So is emacs. So is driving an F1 race car or flying a fighter jet. Development isn't supposed to be easy to learn - but it is supposed to be efficient once you are proficient at it. And that is exactly what Perl is.
If you think about it almost every Google product has been directly inspired by something else. They're in the business of evolutionary improvements and throwing their weight behind them (Offering 1GB storage on Gmail for example or free Google App Engine). Sounds kind of like what Microsoft did really.
My first reaction to this is "omg! wtf!? why?", but I really shouldn't knock it until i've tried it. This could actually be really cool...IF you have windows xp/vista and like this sort of thing.
"and I totes love it."

Huh? Totes? What? I guess I'm just not cool enough for this site.
* No

* No

* No

Those are all desktop technologies. VMware make the majority of their revenue from dedicated virtualization servers, that connect to a shared SAN, and allow VMs to be moved from one physical server to another while running.

Their competitors are:

* Microsoft HyperV (missed inclusion inWin2K8, but available as a seperate download - can't move VMs without downtime). Management through MMC.

* RHEL Advanced Server (RHEL 5 with oVirt, a web based management tool, or Virtual Machine Manager, a shitty desktop based one. KVM/Xen is used as the engine, with a preference towards KVM. Not sure on moving VMs, know its planned but haven't payed with it much.

* Citrix Xenserver

* Hosted Xen, eg Amazon EC2.
Well, it's not an excuse, but believe it or not, there are many non-native English speakers that use .mac. Some of them may even have a name that looks very similar to Marko Karppinen.
My god.

Are you making love to your computer or what?
Have you taken a vacation lately?

Get away from your current location. Experience something new.

Guard your time away and don't let the work intrude.

You'll be surprised how much easier problems like this become with a little time to recharge your battery.

And if you find the job puts you right back in this blue space after a few days back... then look for another job.
And look how complicated they make it. Sometimes spaces, sometimes not, how confusing. And tell me that their "Use spaces around arithmetic operators" example doesn't make you want to puke:

i = i + 1
submitted += 1
x = x * 2 - 1
hypot2 = x * x + y * y
c = (a + b) * (a - b)

Who writes like that?? I very strongly disagree.
TSA scuffing my MacBook angers me; Will this fix that?
I always thought it was funny that http://☭.com was taken, and furthermore that whatever software the squatters use was smart enough to put ads for Russia-related things on the page.
How to email customers effectively
Haptic Feed Back Touch Screen from Nokia...
No, Google TRIED to acquire IMVU. When IMVU pulled a Yahoo, Google decided to hire away one of their key guys, who was a co-founder as well. Then they put him on Lively.

Google is learning to do business the Microsoft way. Make an offer ONCE. They don't take it . . . make an example of them. The next startup you want will take the money, even if you are lowballing them.
What Microsoft wants from Yahoo (Yahoo's paid-search patent)
Progamming? This is Web surfing!
Sure. But

Dude, quit your job, work at a coffee shop, and build things because you want to build them.

is stellar advice. Seriously. The sabbatical is the instrument of champions.
Word completion is available and it would be possible to implement something like this in vim script. But, as far as I know, vim users don't typically use this; it doesn't generally fit in with the philosophy of the editor.
Take a break from your personal projects for a few months. Read physics or something or maths or just go and watch a few movies or play video games or go running or join karate.
Basically anything but programming for a few months in your non-work time. Take a vacation if feasible.

Then come back after a few months with a fresh mind and evaluate your options and situation then.
The thing that struck me, and also had me saying "of course" while watching the credits for Wall-E was the animation showing a timeline as it were, of different painting styles from cave wall art through to Van Gogh, pointillism, etc. It is clear that Pixar has people who have a longer perspective and deeper understanding when it comes to art.
Either night works for me..
I'm not big on flagging stuff, but inspirational messages from celebrities seems the exact opposite of hacker news.

And I don't think you can argue that MJ has demonstrated his ability to succeed in realms other than basketball. Well, he seems to be big on gambling.

The other MJ in that picture might actually be more inspirational, what with the HIV and all, and seemingly still having a successful career after basketball.
You get points for using ginormous though.
Amateur Super Computer Design
hmm.. like painters I suppose...
dont quit your job. immerse yourself around creative people. you need money to live, unless you live with your parents.
another article showing that vmware might have been too successful for emc's ceo http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/08/tucci_costs_vmware/
Apparently You People Don’t Really Care About Twitter Downtime
Compelling flying over mountains using Flash
Brooklyn has some rocking art stuff going on and some sweet industrial designers. Some of the stuff on Etsy from people there is just crazy good.
Ticketmaster redesign
The definitive algorithms book is Cormen : http://projects.csail.mit.edu/clrs/
I think you should study this book and here is the MIT course to go along with it : http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...

Learning about NP complete problems is interesting to avoid certain pitfalls and mapping one problem to another is always a valuable technique, but it seems you are fairly new to analysis of algorithms so imho (having been a phd student focused on algorithms) this book and course is a great place to start.

http://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Creative-Approach-Udi-Manbe...

this is also very good
Of course, don't forget to exercise ;)
First things first: A vacation will almost certainly help.

After that, try learning something outside your normal programming repertoire, ideally very different from what you do at work. A new language (I suggest OCaml or Smalltalk, either should have plenty of new ideas to get you inspired), or program category (OpenGL graphics? Interpreters for tiny languages? Games?), etc. Do something new and fun.
I am where you were 3 years ago in age.

But I work full time...

I still have enough energy to do freelance for other people and still work on the stuff that really interests me.

I usually take a break after work and let my brain rest while I watch some comedy, exercise(running or skateboard), take a nap (for 1 - 2 hrs) or spend time with loved ones.

Then I am usually ready to rock until around 2 - 3 A.M.

I think it's really about how excited you are to work on something, or how bad you really want something.
Dugg it, I think I saw you somewhere else a few weeks ago, metafilter?

A stumble question for anybody who knows.
I was getting a bunch of traffic from Stumble Upon and decided to throw up a digg button. Of course, it was late and I didn't test it properly, so it essentially broke my site and nobody stumbled it anymore.

Once a site has been stumbled once, and not thumbed up, is there any way to get it going again?

My site is www.hearwhere.com
I think you are right about there being an error. I didn't try running the code but it looks like it would match everything inside the html comment braces, but incorrectly stop at any occurrence of '-' instead of stopping matching only at '-->' which I assume is what is actually desired there.

So it should be /(.X?<!--)(..X?)-->(.X$)/ instead.

(Note I am using X as asterix because HN at the time of this writing converts asterisks to italics tags.)

But other than that the Perl is perfectly fine. And it is easily readable if you know Perl.
You can redress evil fees all you want; they'll still be evil fees.
I think this article is more about the general concept of genius than about MJ in particular. That makes it interesting, not only inspirational in my opinion.
If going from not making the high school team to the greatest ball player in the world isn't enough, he built one of the most powerful brands in the world. Jordan ( shoes, clothes, movies, endorsments ) brings in more revenue than 10 facebooks could ever hope to. No other sports star or celebrity has ever come close to marketing himself as well as Jordan.
Ask YC (and PG): What books do you have on your bookshelf? 
I'm trying to come up with a "reading list" for the Summer and I would like to hear what the YC community recommends. Suggestions can range from the highly technical (in the style of SICP or ACP) to the more popish ones (such as "The Long Tail" or "Blink!").

What books would you say have helped you the most in your startup or hackering in general?

Which ones gave you the best ideas or insight?

Which ones do you think every Hacker should read?

Any books you have read recently, that you wish you had read earlier in your career? (I'm thinking business books, for instance)
Esr is back
Geez. Please tell me these pun threads are not spreading here from reddit.
But how do you find that job?
If this is even half true this might be the most scandalous thing I've read in years.
I second this, I can't find any way to display an asterisk.
What happened with Moshe Yanai? I can't find much on Google.
Well, here's where this gets fun: most of the kernels we work with are structured like event loops, and disk I/O is asynchronous. When you issue a read vnop in a Unix kernel, your process will probably yield back to the scheduler loop, incurring the out switch and the in switch.

This mmap vs. read argument is as old as the hills. I picked a side a long time ago; keep it simple.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135185
"But there are other forms of concurrency. Processes that communicate using files, pipes, sockets, or even shared memory."

Using multiple single-threaded processes means you're using multiple threads.

What he's saying is true, but he's worded it really clumsily. He's pointing out alternatives to multithreaded processes, not threads per se.
Does fuel include transportation? I assume it includes utilities, and repair of heating devices.

Because with those assumptions I'm spending more like 60% of my income on those things, in the US. Perhaps I'm not buying enough of the other stuff.
I think this version would be clearer though:

print $_ . "\n" foreach ((<>) =~ /<!--(..*?)-->/g);
Serious fitness, binge drinking, and periodic vacations. Make time to work out four or five days a week. Get absolutely plastered on Friday or Saturday -- at the very least hit up a bar and talk to some people. And make sure to get the fuck out of wherever you are every month or two, even if it's only for a weekend.
I can't believe it took you this long to discover Fink. :-)
I do. I think it looks a lot better and more clear. It certainly looks a lot like what I would write down on paper, and that is one of the inherent qualities of Python in general.
EMC CEO's ego has cost investors billions
Perfecting Your Pitch
Avi Bar-Zeev* talks about that and more in this blog post.

http://www.realityprime.com/articles/google-lively

"Ah, finally, we get to see the long rumored Google Virtual World, or one of them anyway. There’s also rumored to be another one with a remarkably similar aesthetic that’s only 2D and doesn’t require a plugin and install. [I imagine they could use this 3D technology on the server side to flatten their avatars into isometric sprites that could be rendered in Flash or AJAX, ala google maps on the client. Any bets?]"

*Avi founded Keyhole which built what eventually became Google Earth
"The whole-file I/O routines, starting with readfile, are a great idea - usually what you want in a file is to read the whole thing. There should be one (file?) for reading the whole file as a string too."

This is easy in blub, too: http://commons.apache.org/io/api-release/org/apache/commons/...(java.io.File) , although that URL gets incorrectly parsed by PG's buggy Arc code. :)
> class fooclass: ... || class Fooclass(object): ...

Is this a joke?

No... it is generally recommended that class names are capitalized, and any classes you create are supposed to inherit from object. This mainly comes into effect when using super().

In Python 3K, I'm pretty sure that all classes will inherit from object without having to explicitly say it.
Is md5() secure or do you also use salts?
Probably a stupid question, but I can't seem to find a definitive answer. My understanding is that md5() is currently vulnerable to rainbow tables, so you should always salt your passwords?
This summer I've read/am reading/am planning to read:

* The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert Caro)

* Options Volatility & Pricing: Advanced Trading Strategies and Techniques (Sheldon Natenberg)

* Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Edwin Burrows & Mike Wallace)

* Egil's Saga (anonymous)

* Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino)

If you have any interest in the history of New York City at all, or if you're interested in seeing an incredibly well done character study, read "The Power Broker." Probably the best biography I've ever read... Ron Chernow's biographies of J. P. Morgan, Rockefeller, and Hamilton are all great, but Caro's on Robert Moses blew me away.
I'm up. magus.pwnsen@gmail.com
Yeah, that got a chuckle out of me too... But a quote is a quote :) Better to leave it exactly as said.
RFID Sniffer
How removing shell calls sped up GitHub
"Ultimately power rests with the founders. A startup with the best people will beat one with funding from famous VCs, and a startup that was sufficiently successful would never have to move. So a town that could exert enough pull over the right people could resist and perhaps even surpass Silicon Valley."

http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html
I feel like a second-class citizen when I'm looking for apartments and have to sift through ungodly crap, much of which is priced above what I'm willing to spend. The inherited wealthy are a small set of people, but they have a huge effect on real estate here. Aside from that, I think New York is too diverse to be just "about money", and so I disagree.

New York will be an awesome place to live after the real estate crash. I will be so happy to see that happen.
I can't see anyone justifying not using salts by claiming space savings or processing overhead. Just use decent salts and SHA1 and you will be fine.
by "decent" do you mean in length of 9 characters? is that ideal?
Multicolr Search Lab - Navigate Flickr by Color
ticketmaster won't be bearable until they stop charging 14.00 service fees, per ticket
Those "rockstars", by definition would be the wannabes, who then, as today, are in ample surplus.
Indeed. Even their adwords/adsense business model was copied from Overture.
> I still much prefer Perl over Python

> The steeper learning curves are justified by the power.

What can you do in Perl that you can't do in Python?
Link was broken, here 'tis: http://www.kensingtonvictoria.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/20...
I find it difficult to suggest that it is all about ANY one thing.

From the essay:

"There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer."
The 33 Strategies of War. - Robert Greene

I am too nice a guy. I am also the leader of my company. The two don't mix. You have to become somewhat detached, and somewhat of an asshole in order to effectively lead. I found out the hard way that sometimes you have to say to your people "because I freekin said so" instead of trying to be nice to them and let them make the mistake you know they are going to make (silly me, I forgot this was a business, not a community college).

The hardest thing for me, by far, has been to fire someone. I did it two months too late, and everyone in my company suffered for it. My lesson? Be an asshole at the right time.

I love the book I mention because the lessons apply everywhere in business: You need to motivate, you need to earn the respect of your people, you need to be decisive, you need to see the bigger goal, and you need to delegate correctly and put together the right structure in your company's leadership.

I've learned a lot from this book. Guess what? Our productivity is about 2-3 times higher now (no joke, 200% to 300% more work gets done every day). We're running fine, everyone is pulling their weight, and everyone is happy to be making professional progress. My own lesson from this book was that I had to get some balls, crack the whip, and turn from a fellow programmer to a leader and mentor. Your lesson from the book might be different, but I bet that almost everyone has something to learn from this book.
* The Pragmatic Programmer

* Becoming a Technical Leader

* In Search of Stupidity

* Hackers & Painters

* Blockbusters

* Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity

* The Best Software Writing I

* Behind Closed Doors

* Managing Humans

* The Mythical Man-Month

* Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

* The Non-Designers Design Book

* Founders at Work

* Good to Great

* Dreaming in Code

* The Art of the Start

* Maverick

* The Design of Everyday Things

* The Art of Project Management

* The Art of Innovation