skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You need investors when you need heavy funding. For now just live with your parents or wherever and make a prototype. From there you might be able to convince an investor that this is the next big thing. If you are hosting a website, then start it up, and show it off.

Hell I am 24 and I am not waiting for an investor to make my company a reality. If it fails, who cares, I got many years to try again :)
http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/
Right. Don't put the carriage before the horse. If you have living expenses taken care of and time to spend then you can create something. It does not take investment to get started. Don't think about it too much and just make something.

... or as Guy Kawasaki put it (http://www.changethis.com/1.ArtOfTheStart):

"GET GOING. Start creating and delivering your product or service. Think soldering irons, compilers, hammers, saws, and AutoCAD -— whatever tools you use to build products and services. Don't focus on pitching, writing, and planning."

i.e. make something first.
2008 Design Trends
Now you can upload your PDFs to Google Docs
Why Yahoo Passed On Microsoft's Search Deal (New Details!)
Honestly, this reads like a (poor?) PR move on Google's behalf - explain why .exe is a bad idea to cover up the obvious flaw in blocking .0 extensions. Everyone knows exe is executable, but .0 can (very easily and clearly) refer to non-executable stuff...
We use them and like them a lot. Our site is all Rails, it scaled through a few slashdot/digg spikes easily, no downtime. You are paying for no headaches and stress, and so far we have had none. Worth the price is subjective, but for us, they are.
If it can't find a solution, Google should kill YouTube
Types of Languages
Further Analysis

http://jorgetown.blogspot.com/2007/12/types-and-programming-...
I love doing quick, hacks to improve stuff. Sometimes it's even more fun if it's a system I'm not familiar with. Not really a 'bug', but I made Linux boot faster off of USB pen drive type devices by adding a wait queue:

http://www.welton.it/freesoftware/patches/blkdev_wakeup-2.6....

Although I don't know if it ever made it into the official kernel, as I got tired of prodding those guys to either accept it or reject it (and in the meantime they put in some lame hack telling the kernel to wait N seconds before proceeding in the hope that that was long enough to mount the device), but a number of people have thanked me for it over the years.

BTW, I'm in awe of people who spend all their time hacking kernel stuff. It's hard work, and for many things, you risk crashing your whole computer if things go wrong.
The undecidable Gödel sentence
We just hit that straight on a few days ago. Client wanted something (obviously overdramaticized it), catering to their needs we came up with an elaborate and unfortunately ugly solution, which we thought was ridiculous but necessary. Then my co-worker asked the client a REALLY good question "Did you really have 'this[something]' in mind?" and after a yes from the client the solution was ridiculously simple. And everyone went home happy.

Next time just step back and ask yourself "what did the client really want?" Then ask the client if you guessed correctly.
It's noise.
Hell, my idea of enjoying life is hacking around and coding products. Not many things are better than learning useful stuff. check profile for age
The Virtue of Failing Fast
"If you pick up just about any self-help book, you’ll get the same information: making mistakes is a good thing. What I don’t hear often enough is that you should be making those mistakes faster."

In programming and in business, failing fast is a philosophy adopted by those who realize its benifits. Scott Young has an interesting take on that concepts, pointed more towards personal development.
Why do you need an investor?
Yeah I learned about the XPCNativeWrapper objects last night too. Basically GM has access to every object (from window/document on down) as one of these for security purposes (so the target page can't redefine standard methods). Due to the vagaries of the way they are implemented, you can't call the onclick/onkeypress/etc methods directly. It actually states in the documentation that addEventListener is the preferred (and only working) method.

You can supposedly get access to the underlying JS object from the XPCNativeWrapper object with the wrappedJSObject property and then act on it, but it's a big security no-no. I tried it anyway to no avail.

Your thought on the page not being loaded is kind of where I ended up too. However, my understanding was that GM ran user scripts after the window.onload finished, but I could be completely wrong here. If I assign all the links id attributes in the GM script and then manually add event listeners in my Firebug console, they work fine. Also, you'll notice that later in my script I add click listeners on other items (buttons and links) that work swimmingly, so it's either entirely arbitrary or I'm missing something very obvious.

Thanks for looking at this, I'll look forward to any other thoughts you have.

EDIT: Looks like I was very wrong about the GM script executing after the window load event. I have been playing with wrapping code in a load event listener and have indeed got it working that way. Thanks for the suggestion! I'll hopefully have something polished and posted soon.
Agreed. Maybe it's teen angst (age on profile), but the reason I'm trying to do well in high school is to... get into a better college... and then what? shrug

Something to think about is what the role of high school is - is it to try to get a numerical GPA on how your work ethic is? (Absolutely not. If you love your job, you'll enjoy working at it. Likewise for school. I love hacking, not so much school.)

Or is it to let people find out what they're really interested in? (Only a few people that I know have gone through this by senior year, wanting to apply themselves to x career.)

College, at least after the first or second year, is definitely targeted to one's own career interest, and although it is much more in-depth than high school, for certain careers it can't replicate the amount of learning you have to actually do. In other words: take hacking or entrepreneurship. You'll need experience in the field, and you can't really be taught it like you can be taught biology or chemistry.
It would be exceedingly weird for them to delete comments from AfD discussions, but if they did, they'd still be in the edit history.
It seems that while HN > Reddit > Digg, they are all in the same trajectory :-(

But I guess better apps will be added to the left side, as the current apps make room by moving to the right as a function of time.
This is pretty common. I used to name my submit buttons "submit", but when I started using Javascript to do the submission, I found that form.submit() didn't work everywhere. The reason is because form fields are accessed by form.field_name, and so the field data replaces the function stored in the "submit" slot. sigh.
The customer is not always right
You should do it, but don't expect to get funding. Make your site support itself. Since you are young, you can sink this if it doesn't work out and move on. This may sound pessimistic, but if you are going to fail, fail fast, so you can keep trying more things.
I mailed the one who mailed these, and he pointed me towards the following wikipedia visualization project, which I found pretty cool.

http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/projects/history_flow/
This is _why:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Whytheluckystiff.jpg
What Do Most Data Breaches Have in Common? Incompetence
On the game project I'm working on(as a designer) we use an internally developed scripting language that was originally meant for simple timelined cinematics. It was, according to the author, made in one day.

Each line gets a time in seconds followed by a call on some entity: hello world is "0.0 Script:Print("hello world")". The syntax quickly gets verbose from there - and no multi-line statements allowed!

Some of the flaws of this language:

-Miserable computational abilities. Until just this morning we were unable to add two numbers together. The main limitation is poor access to information - getting things like the x position of an entity requires a language extension - an easy one, but when it's not there....

-A vague notion of types. Variables attached on entities are typically enclosed in quotes: "true", "100", etc. But in arbitrary instances you can also use space-delimited vectors, for example: Script:Goto(100) or Entity.SimpleMovableInst:SetPosition(0 0 0). If you use the wrong thing, you will be lucky to get an error message. Usually it just silently fails.

-Lexical macros. These were added in order to cut down on the number of custom scripts we were using: instead of cut-and-pasting "switch1...door2....etc." variables we could say "$[target]" and it would be replaced at runtime with the contents of variable "target" on that entity instance. But they have the effect of giving a lot of false errors in the cases where we don't need to use those variables on a rich, multi-purpose entity. Worse, if I forget to add a variable necessary for the script, that instance will fail and I may not realize why.

-The parser doesn't recognize delimitation of strings, among other things. Putting a colon inside a print statement causes an error message.

It is no surprise that endless grief has resulted from these various flaws. I fixed bugs resulting from all of the above just today.

It works fine for timelines, but I'm hoping to get Scheme(or something with similar potency) for the next project.
Only problem: Google doesn't support x64 Linux installations.

http://code.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=83194...

(note that the nspluginwrapper link on their site doesn't work for Gears - it was reported by a poster on a mailing list as working, but future posts confirmed it doesn't do the trick)

...whereas both Flash and Moonlight work quite well on x64 now (nevermind the past).
Be Careful When Checking If A Domain is Available!
Domain Front Running:
Domain name front running is the practice whereby a domain name registrar uses insider information to register domains for the purpose of re-selling them or earning revenue via ads placed on the domains landing page. By registering the domains, the registrar locks out other potential registrars from selling the domain to a customer.
When I was working on Adonomics there was a bug that caused certain virus scanners to claim that we were trying to install spyware on the visitor's computer.

It just so happened that there was a string on the page that matched the scanners' virus signature. It was in the HTML so between a few of the offending lines I inserted <!-- THIS IS NOT A VIRUS -->. Problem solved.

I'd never, ever seen a website that did that, let alone one that I created!
Don't Fear the Bubble
Actually, it doesn't explain why Yahoo! passed up on the offer - nothing does.

As a publicly-traded company, Yahoo!'s number one goal is required to be that they keep their stock prices going. Microsoft's deal was for more lucrative, but Yahoo! turned it down (yet again) for murky-clear reasons that aren't backed by numbers or facts - just Jerry Yang's insistence that "Yahoo! can do better."

(Note: I'm glad the deal didn't fall through, IMHO, it would've been the end of both MS and Yahoo!)
Whoa, that was bizarre. I just finished taking the online course of his a few days ago.
Here is another restaurant idea. You could also use the iPhone as a menu, and flip through the entrees and specials like photos. You flip the photo (like in coverflow) and see information like what local farms the ingredients come from, watch a clip of them cooking or growing a special part of it, read or leave comments about it, get information on wines (including links to reviews from Wine magazines)

If it's 199 an iPod Touch soon, and you have a restaurant with 50 seats, it's 10,000 + 50 times the cost of the software to replace your menus with interactive ones. These are better to use (pictures, information, easy to update) and won't have to be reprinted or professionally designed like high end menus. At 25 dollars a software, one 50 seat restaurant is 1,250. One chain with 1000 seats is 25,000. (More if we sell tethers, subtle speaker solutions so the vids can have audio that doesn't disrupt restaurant ambiance, and installation so the touchs don't get stolen).

Imagine how much better that would be for talented chefs. To be able to present more information, better, about their craft on their menus, with the ease of using iLife, and better manage the flow of the front end of the restaurant. I bet they would sell more high end food and wine if they had nice videos of the most expensive food being crafted. They could show off their best or freshest ingredients. It could be managed through a mobileMe like webapp integrated with iLife. It would be a much better experience for the restuarant employees and the customers, and would deepen peoples appreciation for the quality of their food, which would probably get them to spend more on it.

Hey, anyone want to build this with me? It sounds sweet to me.
Google Browser Sync Discontinued, No Firefox 3 Support
I once had to fix a random memory corruption in some X windows code which used a proprietary third party library to which we didn't have the source. After linking with my own malloc/free library that would carefully add lots of guard space around every allocation I discovered that it tended to overwrite an area just past a structure it was responsible for allocating. We reported the bug to the vendor but we had a demo coming up so in the meantime we just wrapped calls to their stuff with some code that swapped in my allocator. Simply allocating 10% more than what the library asked for made the problem go away.
Is eBay Artificially Inflating Listing Numbers?
The Voodoo Envy 133 measures .70 inches when closed and weighs less than 3.4 pounds. It's also a whole let sexier IMO.

http://www.uncrate.com/men/gear/laptops/voodoo-envy-133/
which startups are you referring to in Philly?
Out of interest, I've never heard this naming scheme (calc 1, calc 2, etc?) back in the UK but it seems quite common in the US. Is the content of these courses very standardized? How far does the sequence go?
Umm... there are plenty of 17/18 year olds (probably younger) who make thousands online every month, all without the need for "investors". No offense to YC, but a lot of people on this site seem to think they need to quit their job, lock themselves in a dark closet for 6 months, apply for money, and build a stupid site without making any money at first. Meanwhile there are people (teens, dads, grandmas) building high-quality content sites and making the big $$$ via ads, all without needing "investors".
There are two code bases you would need, both in python it seems. The first is the visualization itself, and the second is the code that takes a full repository dump and parses it into a normalized postgres database. I actually wrote the latter, with a nod from the professor that paid me some poor undergrad research wage to create it, I could probably publish it.
Honestly, "people like explosions because of the big bang" sounds like (too much) THC, rather than LHC.
Redefining the CEO Agenda for the 21st Century
Looks like they place dots around the edges of the screen (randomly) when the document is first committed. Then the physics model pulls in with some linear (to distance) force to developers that have committed to it. Developers repulse everything at a force square to the distance of the object, so that documents find equilibrium at a ring.
Roadrunner supercomputer puts research at a new scale
Ooh, those kinds of bugs are evil. I once had a bug in Rivet caused by Apache and Tcl linking to different versions of the same struct, getting confused, and stomping on some memory. It was really a bitch to track down:-/
If memory serves, this has been on here lots of times, even since close to the early days.
Microsoft’s Letter to The Troops: Our Yahoo Offer Was Better
6 Essential Open Source Apps for Mac Videographers
Forcing a market to commodify by being the first to offer a commodity product is a reasonable goal for a business... I've been toying with this as a source of startup ideas and in the last week or so I've gotten seriously interested in a strategy to commodify virtual worlds. The tech required is pretty big, though, so I'm going to keep it in a pre-commercial, research stage until I have something to show.
What is your argument against sleep.fm, what have you built that solves a problem?

I am not attacking you or defending sleep.fm but since you brought it I thought you could share your views.
Venetian Blinds-Blinds Accessories, soft and home furninshings from Dunelm
It's quite a bit more expensive too. But I agree, it does look nice!
The Sequel To SICP
On reflection, that was a pretty mean thing to say. I should have said, "What a bad choice of words that writer made in that instance."
Browser Speed Tests - Opera Fastest, Firefox 3 Least Memory Usage
Qik on the iPhone coming
Get out there, be curious and build things that solve actual problems.

Amen. You have the makings of an engineering commencement speech in there.
No, coward. You have no chance. Hide in your basement and weep.

Seriously dude just do it. You're young, fuck it. Asking if you can do it is foolish; people have no idea what you're capable of until you do something.
How is brand different from identity? And if you have a quality product, isn't it your brand that communicates this to your customers?
The visual plotting component I was working on would suddenly stop producing output: just a black screen but everything else was normal - no leaks, race conditions, crashes, etc - just no video. The bug was so rare that only customers ever saw it, but they were pissed (serious manufacturing folks, they ran our software 24/7 on production floors)

Eventually I wrote a debugging code around it to take screen shots of the main window and compare it with a reference image about 20 times a second (after each blit) and left it running for months on an old PC.

One night I got an SMS sent by my debugging script with attached call stack, etc, but I knew what had happened without even reading it: I got it 1 second after daytime savings time kicked in - the plotter didn't handle it properly and was trying to plot data from the future, which, of course hadn't happened yet.
Every element with an atomic number greater than 1 comes from the stars:
http://aether.lbl.gov/www/tour/elements/stellar/stellar_a.ht...
Genepax shows off water powered car
Not a single comment was removed from that AfD. Not only would that be completely against policy and instantly reverted, but I just checked every edit to it. (Yes, I need a life.) The article was deleted because the subject wasn't considered notable, not because there's some conspiracy against conservative blogs.
I haven't made the experiences you made, so maybe we can't discuss it in a meaningful way. My thought would be that what you call awareness is just an illusion. Put in another way, I deny that "I think therefore I am" proves the existence of consciousness.

Physics does explain why "we" have experiences. An experience is just an interaction of matter or information. Admittedly, I don't know what matter is, there is of course something about physics we can not understand (to me, so far, the ultimate question is, what does it mean that something exists). But that is another problem than the consciousness issue, in my opinion.
What I thought was amazing was that there were really only about 5 developers that worked on Python until version 2.0 in 2000. Guido essentially plugged away at that project for 9 years with just a little help before it took off. Amazing.
Google Puts Escape Clause in Yahoo Deal
[In robot voice] I am a geeenius!
EDIT:

he linked to the wrong AfD page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/IM...
Yay! Glad you got it sorted out. I was stumped, and finally ran out of time to keep tinkering with it. Even with the code firing after the page was done loading, I still couldn't get it working right.

| You can supposedly get access to the underlying JS object from the XPCNativeWrapper object with the wrappedJSObject property and then act on it, but it's a big security no-no. I tried it anyway to no avail.

The other wrong way that I found out about was the unsafeWindow object; same kind of deal, gives you direct access to the page.
I am a little biased since I worked on PowerDNS :-)

With that out of the way, PowerDNS absolutely is a great match for what you are trying to do. Setting up a master/slave situation is very simple. And having your records just there in MySQL is great if you want to put some PHP/Java/RoR/Python/Whatever web frontend on it.

PowerDNS is highly reliable. I've seen it running for large setups. Including large registrars and even top level domains like .TK.
What happend with ZFS?
The Original Microblogger
So, what, Microsoft is completely oblivious to why Yahoo would accept a less profitable deal from another competitor?

One word: Hotmail. I remember when Hotmail was actually a great service that people were happy to use; I remember being disappointed when Microsoft got ahold of it, and it was only a a year or so afterward that I stopped using it altogether.

I think that some of the influential people at Yahoo actually care about their product, and their users, and couldn't in good consciensce just roll over for a company with Microsoft's track record.
Matt Mullenweg once said they only serve ads on wordpress.com if the referrer comes from a search engine or similar. They didn't want to "punish" regular blog readers by throwing ads in their face. Nice concept, though I can't vouch for whether or not they actually do this...
A Hydrogen-Powered Car Was Built in the 60's? Why hasn't it gone big?
Agreed.

Essentially, any web framework or web programming is a way to give a GUI front end to your database. Learn the database layer, learn how to write sql, learn how to break down your problem into a database model, and be able to think about it in terms of rows and columns in a database.

All the database stuff that you learn is going to scale pretty linearly with any type of web application that you're doing. That is, the more database stuff that you learn the more you're going to know about web programming.
Oh, you found the wrong AfD page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/IM...
Just an update to this. I have the problem fixed now, so thanks all that looked at it. (And thaumaturgy, I owe you a beer.)

New version is on the userscripts page for anyone that wants it: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
Creators of E-Mail Monster Now Try to Tame It  (Rescuetime)
I don't trust any registrar anymore. When I want to know if a domain is available I do a DNS lookup on it's NS records instead of using their web interface or whois. It will just hit the root servers and no registrar will know that I did this. Maybe it is paranoia, but I too have lost some domains that I wanted in exactly the same way you describe.
There is no sequel to SICP. It's just a course, not a book. There was already sort of a sequel (http://mitpress.mit.edu/SICM/), but it's far from new.