skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been working from home for 8 years now. Plenty of time to go through a few cycles of low productivity -> high productivity and back. And plenty of time to try to find the right style of workspace. I've tried working outside in the park and could never stay focused for very long. I feel like a dog sometimes, give me some fresh air and a view, and I want to run around and play. I cannot sit still when I am outdoors. Coffee shops are too noisy. And too many people to look at. I finally fixed up my basement and made a comfortable workspace. Set up a stereo system. Put some effort into the lighting. No windows, no street noise, just a fat monitor on my desk. Feels sort of like a cave but I like it.
One of the things YC could do to help with their horrible 4% ratio is get Hacker News to be less hostile to women. Quite a few women founders have told me how unpleasant they find it here. This thread is a good example of why.
IMO the trend is users with <100 karma posting Ask HNs. If you watch the newest page, nearly every single Ask HN (or other text submissions) are all by brand new users or people with otherwise a very low amount of karma. It's like they've all been introduced to something new and want to try it out. Some new users only post Ask HNs.

At least with polls it's either not obvious how you create them or the karma threshold required to pass is incredibly high.
A Truly Graphic Adventure: The 25-Year Rise and Fall of a Beloved Genre
Good online app for employees daily attendance?
Please suggest!
A friend recently introduced me to Star Trek: TNG, after decades of it being mysterious pop-culture in the periphery of my experience. Rather than watch the whole seven seasons, he picked out about one season's worth of episodes from across the entire run:

http://wiki.thorx.net/wiki/TNG:Condensed

I haven't watched them all yet, but Tapestry is very definitely one of the highlights.
It depends on your school and what you are learning. My advice is to take classes that you want to learn and don't worry so much about finding a job with your degree. College should broaden your mind and introduce you to new ways of thinking. I made the mistake of majoring in an IT degree. Besides the obvious problem of it not being Computer Science, it is incredibly outdated. I wish that I would have done a liberal arts degree and worked on tech on the side. I have learned so much about myself, life, and what I value from taking classes like philosophy, literature, etc. I really wish I would have realized college was about more than getting a job earlier so I could have switched majors.
You could always do your entrepreneurial things you wish and go back to school later. Mind you, it gets tougher each year to go back. But really, what's from stopping you from doing what you want? There is no need to "fall in" to the norms. Do what you want. It's your life.

I will say, though, that you miss many opportunities if you choose to pass up on school. I would take the advice of others and pick a major you truly enjoy. College is for you. It is not high school. Please, do what makes you happy, not what makes your parents happy. You are now grown up. Welcome to the world of responsibility and decision making. It's fun. Enjoy :)
My company was in a similar boat with a decade plus old domain (though I don't think it ever had anything scummy associated with it before we bought it). When we first started testing our site in January '09, our "click here to verify your email address" emails were going to spam, and it was a major bummer. After a week of calling ~100 of our friends with @gmail accounts to sign up and mark the email as not spam, our messages finally started going through.

I have no idea if that's a normal sample size, nor any proof that that's what made the difference. Regardless, I strongly believe that having lots of people go to their spam folder and mark you as not spam has a huge effect; if I was designing a spam filter I'd definitely weight that feedback heavily. If you can somehow build that into your app (i.e. make people verify their email to continue), in the long term it should solve your problem. In the short term, your UX will be a little worse and you'll be constantly wondering how long it's going to take until google trusts you. Welcome to the nightmare that is email deliverability!
We had a similar problem at Yahoo! with BBAuth and OAuth. Developers started out initially building an application that needed access to (for instance) Yahoo! Mail. Unfortunately, there's no way in the Yahoo! Developer Network to "upsize" an application ID or consumer key after it has been created. You can't go back and say, "You know what? My application could be 2x as awesome if I added Yahoo! Address Book support." As a result, developers requested the kitchen sink: Yahoo! Mail, Address Book, Calendar, Flickr, Profile, MyBlogLog, Delicious, Fantasy Sports, Messenger, Updates and so on. In addition, each of those services has different permissions ranging from Read-Only to Read/Write (see https://developer.apps.yahoo.com/dashboard/createKey.html).

Google did a better job of this with their OAuth flow, allowing a "scope" to be passed in the authorization request so applications can dynamically select what they want access to (http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/docs/auth/oauth.html#Scope). This means applications don't have to ask for the world up front when registering. Unfortunately it doesn't fix the "OAuth will murder your children" problem.

Ultimately it's a user experience problem. As the article points out, add too many checkboxes and it becomes too complex. The average user doesn't pay attention (like reading a EULA) and in several cases they're not going to understand the scopes presented to them anyway. Read/Write is pretty clear to most of us, not so clear to my mother.

As an amusing aside, I went to log into Hacker News using their Clickpass integration to sign in using my Yahoo! account. Clickpass does the OAuth song and dance and requests read/write access to my Address Book. "http://www.clickpass.com is asking you and Yahoo! for the ability to automatically sign-in as you to your Yahoo! account through a service or application that is provided by http://www.clickpass.com, and to read and store to your data in Yahoo! Address Book." Evidently OAuth will not only murder your children, it will wipe them from your Address Book, too.
Ins and Outs Of Calling Via the Net
Not realistic. Even if you plow through all of that and obtain a meaningless certification you won't have any experience. You will be wasting your client's time if you get one. You will be competing with people with years of real experience and expertise. Ask yourself if someone would pay you a low rate to do their accounting or fill a cavity if you spent three months reading books and web sites on accounting or dentistry.

What is it about programming that people think it can be learned so fast and cheap?
Sigh, I bought this (when I saw only 1 seat left) for a female potential-startup-founder friend of mine, and of course it puts me as the "attending this event" person, without telling me it would publish my name/photo to the event.
I do not want to make it personal but I like ASK HN and I post ASK HN quite often. Ask HN is something that I guess was here long before I joined HN and it will be here for long time. Polls rarely initiate interesting discussion. This is the nature of a Poll unfortunately. Asking questions or advice is in the core of HN IMO.
It certainly seems like a little bit of consumer education should go a long way, but without competition – or in the presence of collusion – we'll end up with something looking more like text messaging.

Everybody knows the cost to the carrier is only a fraction of what they charge, but there's no competitor willing to charge less. Education, unfortunately, seems to only go so far.
This is really cool, but I wish it didn't depend on AIR... Any plans for a native OS X app?

http://al3x.net/2011/01/15/user-hostile-platforms.html
Not all metros are NYC/DC/SF level cost though. Even among the 1m+ people metros, my $45k would buy a middle-class life in Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, and Dallas. Not a fabulous one, but I'd certainly have no issues living there as a bachelor. Probably harder to make ends meet as a family man, but most Dads don't have entry level positions. Maybe my wife would have to work part-time, but it wouldn't be unmanageable. And that's assuming I don't get another raise[1] in my life.

My point is that in most of the country, anyone in the top 4 buckets (which is to say $50k+) is in pretty solid shape.

[1] - By which I mean a performance or experience related raise, promotion, or new job. Obviously that would require small raises to keep up with inflation.
You could just let them sign up, but do not activate their account. Say something like 'only select/random accounts' will be activated, if they're not activated you could keep their emails and send them a reminder when you are ready for them to use your site.
Interesting idea. TerezaN's XX Combinator would probably be a better model -- http://terezan.tumblr.com/post/816358389/xx-combinator
I just priced out a small SAP installation for a 50 person manufacturing company. $443K.

I'll be having fantasies tonight about the day I have that problem. NB: Having to go to work each day at a dotcom would is my nightmare.
Download Your Booki.sh Books
God. Apply some A/B testing for pricing in the Oil sector.
patio11 I just found your next consulting gigs!!
(I want 20%)
Polls on HN never assume/enforce mutual exclusion.
"The alternatives are essentially an unverified tutor off of craigslist or an agency that takes 50% of the tutor's money."

http://www.teachstreet.com/

Does the same thing, and it's been around since at least 2007. I'm not in any way affiliated (other than meeting the founder once at a party).

I'm not suggesting that the presences of established competition means that these guys won't succeed, but I think it's good to keep the hyperbole to a minimum -- this is not the only option. Heck...searching for "online tutor" brings up lots of similar sites.
If you want to watch them with convenience check out: http://www.youtube.com/user/bluesmoon#p/p

Seasons 1-3 got deleted but 4-7 are still there. Happy watching.
Except I think most of the YC alums attending are actually Alumni.
What’s New About The Upgraded Version- ‘Drupal 7’?
You must be aware about the release of the new version of Drupal- ‘Drupal 7’.
The some post appeared a few hours ago and it has already a few comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2145850
If you have the cash, you could experiment with advertising Doosra cricket on Yahoo.

Your new homepage design is a lot better than your first. Get someone to edit your copy. "Compete with friends or world" should be "Compete with friends or the world". A professional copywriter will probably write something like "Challenge your friends!".

Yahoo Predictopus gives users 1000 points to start with. I see most people on your leaderboard have 0. Give them 10,000 each.

Your target market is Indians. Use Hindi slang words where it's appropriate (without offending the south Indians!). I doubt Yahoo will do that. Your name is a good example.
Looks good at first glance. It's late at night so I've also not tried it yet. There's something "missing" on the landing page but I can't quite tell what it is. Just a feeling I have.

I've been messing around with Corona since we all read about that 14 year old who "won" the app store.

As it turns out... I kindof dislike Corona in general. Although physics in five lines is cool, and I do have an interactive game compiled for both iPod and Android, I find that Corona is poorly documented and inconsistent.

Maybe I'm being picky and impatient - there's a lot to be said for the ridiculously rapid application development and the incredibly low price of their software license.

At the end of the day though, it's not the cost of the tools that is the main issue - it's your ability to develop with them.

I find asset management in Corona development & the lack of good debugging tools to be positively stifling.

A functioning IDE is a third-party tool.

Oh and LUA as a language? I know WOW supports it, but I hate the lack of direct support for OO (can be done with a big of hacky-ness but it's a frigging pain).

Since then I've picked up the Unity3d engine and run with it.

GUI dev environment. Your choice of C#, Javascript, and some other languages... An active "stack overflow" style support forum. Used by 100,000 developers. Compiles game code for iPhone, XBOX, PS3, Wii & the Web... (not sure about android)

Has physics. 3D native. Imports models from everything from Blender through Maya & 3Dstudio... Bajillions of pre-fab functions standard. Amazing series of tutorials on youtube (look up Tornado Twins). Free license for everyone earning less than $100K (enough to get you rolling)

After a week in Corona with good, but not stellar results, I jumped onto the Unity engine and had fantastic results very quickly.

I really hate to say it because I followed Carlos' tutorials and the anscamobile team seems to very genuinely care about providing a top-of-the-line product, but it's really just not there yet.

Unity 3d is a far better choice. (for now, in my opinion) - you'll at the very least be able to use C# and Javascript "in the wild" if your game plans don't work out. Think about it... what are you going to do with LUA? Write a WOW addon? (to be fair, some of those guys make $100k in profit sharing from sites like curse... but that's another rant)

Anyways.

@ZYANG - you may want to compare notes with your tool against the Corona Rapid Prototype tool built by nerder in Silverlight http://www.nerderer.com/crp/ I was planning on working this weekend on a Unity project, but I'll try to find the time to have a play about with this and get your some, constructive feedback. (if my opinion's worth anything ;)
These sorts of polls probably attract people who rarely post. The sort of guy looking at this site and reading it and saying either "I wish I had their guts" or "I'm getting ready to take the plunge". They're probably guys with a few years of experience under their belts, so they're probably making more than entry-level pukes like me or founders living on Ramen.

By which I mean that it's probably your second guess ("there's fewer founders than expected")
Only his point seems to be that you should compare the gross salary before employers taxes.
Read this. It's shorter than the stuff already on your list: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

You probably don't know who Peter Norvig is, or why his opinions matter more than anything on W3schools, but believe me that they do.
I was stupid and bought a seat to give to a female potential-startup-founder friend of mine (mainly because it was the last seat, and she's already asleep), but it signed me up instead. Oh well.
DRM in ARM designs - It has long been there, nothing new. That hasn't changed anything. http://www.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/trustzon... says all Cortex-A class CPUs support it.
Yes, I see now that you do post a lot of them. Text posts are not bad. I like that we have this feature. I use them on the rare occasion myself, but everything is good in moderation (so they say). A constant flood of Ask HNs has brought cause to make the threshold of up-votes required to front-page an Ask HN higher than a normal post. This means that people with worthy questions or review my startup type posts have a higher chance of getting washed aside when the people who do care about those posts aren't all surfing HN during that short window of opportunity. So basically it's a feature that I think gets used too often for too trivial of things. I don't want to risk getting too personal here, but most of your Ask HNs are too trivial of things. Questions that are just as easily satisfied by Google.

Edit: To be clear though, when I made that original comment to you I hadn't looked at your account, so the comment wasn't actually directed at you.
http://www.clockspot.com/
> Except, of course, that doesn’t work. The preprocessor
> only makes one pass through the file, meaning a macro
> can’t call another macro.

macro.c:
#include <stdio.h>
#define LOOP(n) for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
#define PRINT10 LOOP(10) { printf("%d", i); }
int main(void) { PRINT10; printf("\n"); }

gcc -Wall -std=gnu99 macro.c && a.out
0123456789

Of course macros can call other macros:
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/cppinternals/Macro-Expansion.h...

Ignoring his poorly protected macros, and taking nothing away from Lisp, am I missing some subtle point he's making, or is the author just flat out wrong here? I think he's just wrong, and this makes it hard for me to even read the rest of his argument.
What if I'm a contractor and it's irregular?
You can't.

You can try to reduce the horribleness of a CSS file, but the language simply doesn't provide the tools needed to do the one thing all programmers need to manage complexity: abstract away the common part of two specific processes into a reusable component.

I'll never forgive the designers of CSS for not at least providing immutable constants, if not variables.
oligopolies are a bitch
>Please shoot me if I ever again work for a company which has a defined bracket for overtime between 1:30 AM and "the start of business the following day".

No, but I'm pretty certain given some of your more rarefied skills that you'll always have someone willing to pay for your time.
Initially workers are hosted by you but down the road we're looking to add some nice hosted / management features for those who want it (think github hooks for auto-deployment / upgrading of workers) If your data is sensitive you can always encrypt it without too much overhead. We're working on supporting SSL for transport and we have IP-based restriction to queues along with a management console. In our experience, most of the data that goes through our systems is pretty meaningless without context (but we understand that some folks will want something a little extra.)
IPhone arrival slowing down Smartphone sales at Verizon
Sony announce PlayStation Store, PlayStation framework for Android
Chuck Klosterman wrote a wonderful essay (it's in his collection "Eating the Dinosaur") about laugh tracks, and more broadly, about the way we use laughter. His thesis was that, especially in the mundane interactions among strangers that populate daily (US) life, laughter is a nearly continuous stream that reassures everyone that both they and everyone else around them know what's going on.

Next time you're in a conversation with a group of people you don't know, stop and listen for the laughter - it will be hard to hear because you're so used to tuning it out, but it will be shocking in its frequency when you finally pick up on it. (NB: pointing the laughter out is a good way to alienate yourself from strangers.)

Klosterman talks a bit about his essay here: http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2009/10/17/chuck-klosterman-o...
http://www.staffnote.com is perfect.
Congrats guys, I'll be using your new platform to build a cross platform plugin in the next week. Keep up the good work!
This leaked data from June 2010 gives some interesting insight into the distribution of AdWords account sizes...
http://searchengineland.com/googles-top-adwords-advertisers-...

I work on accounts of varying sizes, approaching $1M/month. At that level, we have access to a handful of dedicated reps who quickly fix issues like this when they arise (in addition to weekly support meetings and a handful of other nice-to-haves.) The smaller accounts I work on barely get any attention, so I can sympathize.

That being said, the established accounts I've seen don't have these types of issues. (Even some of the smaller accounts I work on don't run into holdups often at all.) I suspect it has less to do with budget and more to do with some sort of trust built up over time and the frequency with which you make changes to your account (if you make frequent changes without causing problems, you are given more leeway, maybe?) Casual observations on my part, but something I've noticed.
Ask HN: Can Hacker News be considered a social network?
Social networks usually attract a wide range of people. However, LinkedIn is a great example of a social network that targets a more selective audience than other networks that preceded it. The people who use it are usually professionals looking to make connections online. Quora, StackOverflow, and other sites that started out as Q&A services have show potential in the social networking market as well.

So I was wondering if we could start calling Hacker News a social network. While HN has always been a place for inquisitive minds to share links and ideas, it has also become a place for people to connect with others who have the same interests. It may not be the social network most of us are used to, but it does provide the same uses (interacting socially with others) under a different context. One of the reasons why we can consider HN a social network is the fact that many of use use our real identities rather than anonymous ones (a group that I ironically don't belong in).

Anyways, I wanted to hear other people's opinions on naming HN a social network. While categorizing HN as a social network may not have that many applications, the discussion around it can help clarify the true purposes HN serves and new online areas the site can expand in to.
Thanks :-) we're looking forward to seeing what you come up with. Excited to have you as a beta customer!
Have you ever been to the Midwest? Especially outside of Chicago.
I noted this too. Seems the author has a broken C compiler.
It's fun to look around at the limits in terms of how long it'd take you to do it with a 56k modem.

250GB, which they consider pretty high, would actually take a while:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=250GB+%2F+56Kbps

But smaller values are less impressive. 10GB is only half a modem month.

Looking at the $1/GB thing gets more interesting. How much would it cost me to run a 54Kbps modem 24/7 for a month at $1/GB:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2856Kbps+*+1+month%29+...
Dictation is a nice alternative.
Its already been done. By private companies selling to the Highest bidder, mainly the Govt. How do I know, cause I have been watching my coworkers working on the project for the past year. Its just not public yet...
Beautiful HTML5 Protein Viewer online on GAE
The entire point of trying to copy Groupon is that they want to diversify their revenue stream, rather than relying on a single cash cow. Defending the cash cow at the expense of future growth would be a short-sighted strategy.

I agree that they should devote more resources to fixing this problem, but I would rather those resources come from more established underperforming products, rather than new opportunities.
There is still a huge difference between declining all ads unless they are explicitly approved, and having people explicitly disapprove ads.

I know the rules quite well, have never had an ad disapproved, but the process is just frustratingly slow.
That's a Western historical view on it. I wonder what other cultures thought of it.
for what concerns capital letters, from the essay I cited before [http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/pikestyle]: "I eschew embedded capital letters in names; to my prose-oriented eyes, they are too awkward to read comfortably. They jangle like bad typography". As Pike acknowledges this is just a matter of taste.
agree.... I hope the wireless careers can give some stiff competition to the wired incumbents like comcast, road runner and their ilk.... that did be nice!!!!!!!
Twitter Hires Bing's Principal Scientist Away From Microsoft
Sad that there seems to be so few of us on HN :(
Hey Ryan, sorry about the confusion, as we have strict orders for females only, but glad we could make it work out in the end!
Sounds like you probably removed the enamel. Lack of enamel can cause tooth decay. Although you have a cap, which could protect you. Still, did you think about that?

Did you at least discuss with a dentist first?!