skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Siestas are one of the best traditions ever.

As for corporate america though, I find that one can actually take a "decent" half-hour nap in the car, if you have to.
It's in place for Hacker News because when your site gets owned by a cracker, you can't do much hacking, can you? :)
Blogging for Burma: Darkness
Ask YC: Is it just me?
isn't twitter pretty much facebook status messages. If someone just makes a service which uses the facebook api to get your friend's status messages, would they not have cloned twitter. Facebook has a much larger userbase and obviously scales much better than twitter.
You can update your status in facebook using a number of different ways (api, web, mobile etc...). Whats the big deal with twitter? I can't understand it.
Are there blogs (ala TechCrunch) that cover hardware startups? It will be interesting to follow them regularly.
If it were just escapism, any MMO could claim that. But none do. Not anywhere close to what Warcraft has achieved.

I think it's the magic combination of elements that has given WoW the megacrown. And you've listed several. If you've played Wow, you get it, but you don't exactly know why.
Agreed, am I allowed to flag this one?
One of the ways I've learned a ton is to find a site that I really like and then begin to clone the design locally.

I'll go line-by-line through their original HTML and CSS and rebuild the page.

This seems simple and obvious, but after years of hacking design, I am still impressed and inspired by spending an hour or two mucking about in other people's code.
Top 10 Reasons Why Dating an Entrepreneur Rocks
I have been using SportsTwit to track games that I can't watch. It has been around for quite a while: http://www.sportstwit.com/
A lot of decent code won't fit into 78 columns with 8-character tabs. An if statement inside a for loop inside a function inside a class is already 4 levels of indentation. Call a ten-letter function with three ten-letter arguments and you're over the limit.

It depends a lot on the style of code... some apis will have really long names and require a lot of arguments. In this case you'll run over 80 columns even if you use two-space indentation (which we do at my workplace).
An Interview with Michael Parkatti &amp; Michael Marrone who are now at Y Combinator
Never heard of such a device. You really do learn something new everyday!
JavaScript gives you the most possibilities because you can place semi-transparent items anywhere in a webpage, they can resize with user interaction and move down a webpage as a user scrolls. JavaScript can also be used to re-write a webpage, including changing images, fetching more text, revealing optional form elements and the changing the destination of hyperlinks.

Some, if not all, of this can be achieved with IFrames and Flash but web browser security is such that you'd have to include JavaScript anyhow.
That was... weird. I read the article, then clicked on the demo... and it was a chat-place, where there was no one except me. And a few moments later there appeared the guy who wrote SymbolicWeb. He was in Norway, and it was 4:05 for him, and 10 o'clock for me. These sort of encounters remind me what the internet can really do.
dupe http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=213669
Why is there so much FP in finance? I had the impression that finance used mostly C++, which is a big part of why I avoided applying for most quant jobs.
Ahem. I said it makes me more of a scientist than a programmer by training. Please read carefully before flaming.

And if math is your thing, that's fine. Study what you like. Although I'll admit I'm more than a little confused by your assertion that basic science is no longer "in development"...
#1 Reason easily explained:

Blizzard

Their attention to creating what they consider the 'perfect' game on a platform they create is mind blowing. They have had Starcraft 2 what any other company would consider 'finished' for probably 2 years. But they run massive beta tests, continually tweak and perfect the game.

It shows in every one of their products - look at the Starcraft/Warcraft/Diablo series - not a single flop or poor game.

I bet you right now that Starcraft 2 becomes even more popular than the original - and the original is still played in large numbers ten years later!
Results from every episode of MythBusters ever aired on the Discovery Channel
Although, to be fair, I hear they have fixed quite a few memory leaks this time around: "Over 300 individual memory leaks have been plugged..." (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0b1/releasenotes/)
Hedge fund jobs here in Dallas are looking heavily for C# and vba (excel) skills.

There are about 2-5 hedge fund jobs that have been open for at least a year that just can't find someone willing to work their butt off for $110k and 50+ hours a week.
Holy Hell, I May Buy Windows Vista
Its completely open. I have the source code and the commit logs for the project. I can read the vulnerable code myself and make up my own mind about the potential attack vectors.
Since I know I will need to raise capital eventually I've been making sure I stay in touch with everyone in my close network. Especially family and friends parents who would be in a position to help.

Seems somewhat selfish but I wouldn't offer them anything that I'm willing to risk my credibility for.
Matt,

You really don't play WoW. It doesn't even go up to level 82. Heh.
To be fair, he mentions dual booting his mac not so much a new PC.

There is an app for OSX that lets you connect to xbox 360. I tried it briefly and it couldn't find my box.
The OS has 'pipe'

STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR

learnings from the nix
Where in Kenya? I live there and unless your friend was doing drugs, his story sounds highly implausible.
“AutoGrid” for YUI Grids — Using JavaScript to Create Adaptive Grids » Yahoo! User Interface Blog
23+ Impressive Tools for Faster Javascript/Ajax Development
That sounds pretty cool - is there a url for it?
Web-Based PHP FTP Application: phpWebFtp
The Exemption Pass
I think Rachel Hartman's character Lalo said it best in "Blondweg Blossoming": the secret to being interesting is being interested.

My wife and kids and I have a rule - I'll watch whatever 10 minute video they want to show me on YouTube if I get to show them a 10 minute clip from Cosmos. Let's just say they that their about at their limit of "Star Stuff" :-) But I don't think any less of their intelligence or curiosity just because Carl Sagan isn't their thing. My wife knows much more about philosophy then I and my kids interest in biology and psychology is greater than mine.
Curiosity is nice, and have appreciation for another's interests is great. Aptitude takes many forms. Beauty can be its own topic of geekery. Just as there are more VB & PHP kids than hackers, there are more TV & Magazine idolizers than connoisseurs of taste.

EDIT: vapid eyecandy is good for one thing, and then it is seldom good.
"Yes, XML syntax is better for writing and editing structured human-readable documents. eg. something like XHTML."

(:html
(:head (:title "I like s-expressions better to read and write XHTML."))
(:body
(:h1 "Some advantages of s-expressions")
(:ul (:li "Not having a redundant end tag is a " (:strong "HUGE") " improvement.")
(:li "Parentheses are nicer than angle brackets " (:acronym :title "in my humble opinion" "IMHO") "; they're also easier to type on most keyboard layouts.")
(:li "You have more room to extend the language, for example having complex attributes."))))

<html>
<head><title>I like s-expressions better to read and write XHTML.</title></head>
<body>
<h1>Some advantages of s-expressions</h1>
<ul>
<li>Not having a redundant end tag is a <strong>HUGE</strong> improvement.</li>
<li>Parentheses are nicer than angle brackets <acronym title="in my humble opinion">IMHO</acronym>; they're also easier to type on most keyboard layouts.</li>
<li>You have more room to extend the language, for example having complex attributes.</li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>
"sure has some cool link on his site"

Do people really use 'link' in the singular form instead of plural to mean 'linkage' in some sort of Web-2.01 slang that I'm out-of-touch with?!
remote work can be hard to find without a portfolio. thankfully, making a portfolio doesn't require much more than you already have.
Tips for Better Blogging
Stupid Secretary WTF
Announcement: Alex Sells Out
Shameless plug: I'm slightly involved in a similar project with some guys in Brazil, where people may get all news and results related to the football (soccer for you, american guys) teams.

It's called SigaSeuTime (Follow Your Team), at http://www.sigaseutime.com.br . People may follow all teams and games from the Brazilian National Cup or Euro 2008.
Are You Cool, Man? and More
It Gets Worse Each Year
Getting the Numbers and Doing the Arithmetic (John McCarthy)
Where should your focus be in Development, Sales and Marketing?
Or...get ready for the deep philosophical epiphany...

are facebook status messages pretty much tweets?
Although the RIAA has surely tried.
Premier snack reviews portal for the UK
The Quick Meal
Reward Program - memolink.com
I just now created an account here just now so I'd have the opportunity to tell y'all that Oleg's a freakin' god. He's up there with sigpfe, Wadler & Peyton-Jones -- he's one of those cures for hubris we're lucky to have around....
The Source Control Shingle
Let me correct that: Government Programs + anything = Bad Mix. In fact, we can take this further to say Government Programs = Bad.
Where are you located? The companies I'm in never seem to fill all their developer positions.
It seems that Sweden has just approved a similar rogue law:
http://armstrongonsoftware.blogspot.com/2008/06/invasion-of-...
I really want to believe its not just "The Office" with 50 cal. machine guns over there.

This does not instill me with a great deal of confidence in this regard.
I just went to Forbes.com following an article link, they bring up an a random quote and an ad below it. Here is the quote it brought up:

"God is subtle but not malicious"
-Albert Einstein
Accountants are needed everywhere, so if you're not emotionally/socially tied to Alabama, maybe you want to become a dual-income couple elsewhere.

If you're trapped in Alabama, edw519 makes good suggestions about personalizing your pitch and ibsulon, below, about broadening your search to 'adjacent' positions that could lead to coding.

To build the kind of rep that could get you remote work, do publicly observable projects, on your own or as part of open-source projects. You might also try doing small freelance jobs via other cities' Craigslist, Rentacoder, Elance, Odesk. (You're competing against some very cheap overseas coders but you've got the language and culture down, a first-world degree, and still live in one of the cheapest areas of the US.)
I almost always write tweets beginning with 'is...'.

I use twitter as a substitute for blogging, which I can't possibly commit to (takes me too long to write a post).
JPC: An x86 emulator written in Java (yes, it runs Linux)
A self-appointed CEO / Janitor's perspective is going to be very different from pretty much everyone else in the workforce. Many leaders in middle-management literally got "'ass-kicking-certification plaques' at [their] doorstep[s]..." in the form of an acceptance letter to business school. As coglethorpe said, doing end runs around your superiors will get you fired.

This guy's cool and all, but he's on a plane that does only intersects with corporate America at the talent pool of sheepish employees.
Seems odd to me that female entrepreneurs would feel the need to market themselves like this. I guess a good entrepreneur never misses an opportunity, huh?

Regardless, I'd rather date an angel investor.
And of course, he didn't do the real analysis: is there any variation in the chance for a post to be noticed depending on time of day/day of the week. He just says more toprated posts were made on Thursday at noon: I wouldn't be surprised if that was simply due to more posts being made on Thursday at noon. How does the percentage of posts that make it to top rating vary by day/time? Midnight on Saturday may actually be you best time for scoring a top rating, if you really care about such.
Firefox Deletes Printers, and More Support Stories
Ruby on Rails: From Hackers to the Enterprise
Perfectly Adequate Productivity
Dual-display e-book reader lets you flip pages naturally (great HCI!)
No, but almost. First, twitter, unlike facebook, is asymmetric. Therefore, I can follow all my favorite web-celebrities, and they can totally ignore me. Second, because twitter is about more then just the most recent message from that user. It's an aggregation of those messages.

I think the real use for twitter comes from either sending out links, or mentioning breaking news (like, for example, tim russert's death, which zipped around twitter long before it broke).

In that regard, I think the a more "proper" mental model for twitter isn't so much as aggregated facebook status messages, but more like distributed reddit (except, in a central place... so.. psuedo-distributed?).
Not yet. I'm trying to get him to get a blog up and running as I think a number of people here would find what he's doing pretty interesting.
The Laws of Online World Design
I think it was honest. We are just used to hearing all the hype.
I think many great startup successes finance much of their initial development via 'technical debt'.

If you go bust, it's free! (You can default.)

If you win big, you pay it off out of your winnings.

Perhaps it should be treated like any other possible source of financing... does the advantage (speed out of the gate) justify the cost (fixing it later, in only the positive outcomes)?
Ask cperciva: Are great mathematicians born or made?
Okay, I have been reading quite a bit about this whole nature vs nurture debate. But I want to hear it straight from the horse's mouth. Can people who are not inherently 'gifted', start with an immense interest in math at a mid-point in their life, and still go on to make meaningful and significant contributions to the field? In other words, is precocity a prerequisite to doing good work in Math? I'd be interested to hear from a Putnam fellow like you. Also, what are the rest of YC readers' thoughts on this?
Maybe the only thing I can tell you on quick review is to allow gamers to somehow display their games, their score etc.

Maybe they should be allowed to display their games on their profile including videos.

Possibly it could develop into something where strong players can find other strong players and challenge each other over the Internet.

I think it has some potential.
Why We Built & Launched InGameNow
HTTP 414: Way Too F#%&ing Long
Atlantic.net (network/hosting) has been down for at least 8 hours, isn't telling customers why
THANK YOU! I could not even read the whole thing. I just got done watching 10,000 BC and guess I am not in the mood for another epic.
She's marketing her social network and dating site:
http://network.ladieswholaunch.com/general/login.asp?e=
Fonts: When Comic Sans Isn’t Enough, Sites Help Create Custom Fonts
I remember reading in a book by Tom Peters that Toyota has a suggestion box system they take seriously. Like, they implemented 6,000 employee suggestions a year at one point.
Xobni Gets Even Better With LinkedIn Data For Your Contacts
Do You Believe In Magic... Online
Virtudyne: The Next Generation of Collaboration
Rupture.com, is all about stats so I'm trying to take a different approach. I do want to eventually have more things to post on profiles, but I need feedback to figure out what people really would want.

I think I might go ahead and post a new thread and launch it on HN. Would that be a bad idea?

I am in dire need of feedback like this.
Briefly -- I'm talking about protective tariffs and IP laws.
I'd rather date an heiress.
Don't blame college or your parents if you're intentionally staying in a bad market. _Move_ to a place where your wife will clear 60 and you will clear 60. Easy.
IBM Survivor, The High Road, & Find the Function
In case you didn't know, it's a slight alteration of Thomas Edison's famous quote: "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration."

37signals has been beating the drum that inspired programming can greatly decrease the required perspiration, and even then, perspiration doesn't mean Rapleaf's long hours.
Ok I'll get a blog going with some screenshots/MPEGS and audio examples. If you guys are interested.
Wtflib.php
Ask YC: So,I have a working Prototype...Now What?
I don't live in SV or Boston, but I need to find a Good-Angel. Somebody with heart..
The investors here (small town Canada), kind of struggle with getting Web 2.0. They like hardware.

So any good advice on what YOU would do to go to the next level. Would be greatly appreciated.
Is it get an attorney or get an investment banker? I asked a related question about the value of investment bankers awhile back and got a nice answer:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=192860
37Signals "just says no" to feature request: "please fix that security flaw"
Please no, I joined YC to get away from the politics that have taken over reddit and Digg. I like this place for it's tech and entrepreneurship news, not these stories.
No... Stop... It's a trick....
There's no magic formula that produces valuations. But one way to think of them is as a negotiation about what the multiple is.

Consultancies commonly sell for 1.5x-2x, because staff turnover means the acquiring company is really only getting a pipeline, some relationships, and maybe a few staff.

Enterprise product companies commonly sell for around 5x. Security valuations oscillate between 5x and 15x (on the wildly successful side). Sometimes new, small startups sell for ridiculous high multiples because otherwise the total number would be too low.

I'm not saying, "take your revenue and multiply by two". I'm saying, "think about the value you provide your acquirer in the abstract", and then put a multiple to it.
Don't try to read too much into it, it's probably just a boring typo.
I'd rather date a world-class philosopher.
Too many bosses like lumberg (from the movie Office Space) out there.

Can't get any referrals.

Besides Microsoft and the rest are scouring the streets of third world cities like bombay and Calcutta picking up throwaway kids and teaching them how to program.

Only one out of 50 makes it but when they kick in they only cost $15 an hour.

Who the heck needs those expensive kids with Computer Science degrees.
I dislike the collectivist slant in this (and similar) pieces. It's written as if 'female entrepreneur' is a category one can reasonably make generalizations about. In fact it is a very diverse category and the generalizations presented are not an accurate guide to any individuals.
Lots of comments about being a parasite, adding no value, and that he deserved it... but I don't see it that way. Sure, it was "obvious" that it would eventually get shut down, but he built a $100 million/year business out of it... and knew that it was going to be short lived. I respect his plans to flip it into a legitimate business. If Google had not shut it down for about 6 months more, Geosign might have become a major player.
You mean like a magazine of blog essays like the Journal of Bloglandia, ISSN 1940-7645? http://wapshottpress.com/j-bloglandia/

Issue 1 is on sale at Amazon and Lulu. We're looking for essays for Issue 2. If any of you would like to send me an essay formatted correctly on the template, I'm sure I'd love to print it.

Ginger Mayerson

Editor, J Bloglandia
duhhh... If you got a brain you definitely don't want to be working for MS.
"We believe the perfect is the enemy of the good. This means we focus on getting things done, not on building the most perfect system. We strongly believe in rapid iteration."

This is the only quote that I think has any meat. All others either I don't agree on or nothing profound. _However_, it also makes them seem like an hypocrite since it clearly says they prefer speed+good over perfect+slow. But if they mean what they say, then they are clearly looking for perfect candidate(filtering out good ones) + slow (process of the interview and wasting time looking for the perfect one(s) ).
Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate... or Duplicate
Hi dwaters,

I know you are waiting for cperciva to give you reply. But I want to tell my own experience.

I was very bad at math when I was in high school. I figured out algebra without problem but failed pretty bad in classical geometry when I was 9th grade. From my 10th to 12th grade, I just have dyslexia to what math textbook says.

Then I studied with 2 teachers for a year to prepare taking another entrance examination in my country (Taiwan). Both explained clearly two things to me that I like most later, one is physics and another is math. The math teacher taught me calculus in 2 weeks and I just started to become literate to meanings in those symbols and after that when I look back analytic geometry and classical mechanics in our high school textbooks, I just felt my mental block was removed! I did not feel any trouble in understanding the problems and I later chose my major in physics just because I like to learn more of it and went through my undergraduate pretty ok and later I found computer science and I started to work in the trench for 16 years.

I did not make any contribution to math and physics, but I still like to use the training that I received in my daily life and I still sometime open books from Dover Publishers to read and feel interested. I like the feeling in figuring out problems and find ways to solve them. And that is the joy I'm glad to had a chance to acquire due to two best teachers that enlighten me.
I can relate to that PP.
Buy books unrelated to web design that talk about design or have deigns you like and study what makes them "good." Typography, color, etc. are best learned by experiencing them through the work of great designers.
"Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it's this veneer -- that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."

- Steve Jobs
Hierarchy and Leadership in Society
Virtudyne: The Gathering
i'm sure the first question you'll get here will be: "what is your app and what does it do?"

gotta meet people half way -- cool that you're asking for advice, but without more information not much people here can do for you.
This is absolutely true. And as a prospective employee, it's your job to make sure that you don't get screwed.

Obviously, you can't predict the future; you'll never know if a company is going to go public at a valuation of billions, or go broke in a year. But you can use certain guidelines: How many companies in the industry have gone public/sold/failed? What were the successful companies' valuations? What's your employer's current valuation? Etc.

Moreover, anything less than a percent of equity in a startup really isn't worth your excitement. Only a tiny handful of startups ever sell for valuations of >$50 million. In the event of a sale at that valuation, your 1% stake is worth (at most) $500,000 -- nothing to sneeze at, certainly, but not enough to retire young. Yet very few engineers are granted that much equity; unless you're one of the first employees, a more typical stake is 0.1% or less. So now, that $50 million exit is going to pay you $50,000 -- a nice down-payment on a house (in Ohio, maybe). About the only way to get rich via employment is through extreme luck (i.e. find the next Google and join early), or through the gradual accumulation of shares over a long period of time.

Bottom line: demand fair compensation, and don't sell yourself out for stock options. Startups can be great places to work, they're fun, and you'll learn a lot, but unless it's your startup, you're most likely not going to get rich.
Midphase coupons
www.midphasereview.org with lot of midphase coupon code that give discount and 3 free months of midphase hosting.
Well, let's just compromise and call Paris Hilton the perfect woman.