skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for clarifying. I'm glad that you got so much from my post that you re-read it, even if not everything you got from it is positive.

1) I didn't intend the post to come off as arrogant, nor the replies to be defensive. I guess it's very hard to know what impression you give to people.

3) I think I mostly wrote it as some kind of therapy (I certainly felt better after writing it). The other part I think was to explain my side of the story; the internet can be harsh and people made wild and inaccurate guesses in the absence of an "official" version. And I think I wanted to help people learn from my experience a little bit too, though since it's so hard to know what people will learn, I took the focus off that early on while writing it.

4) I never intended to apologize in this post. I did apologize to the people affected (YC, investors, co-founder, journalists) separately, but this wasn't about that. I think there's a feeling that we should also apologize to some community at large, which I didn't do, since I confess I don't understand the sentiment behind it.

5) I don't really believe in assigning blame in life, just in figuring out why something happened and taking steps to fix it and make sure it doesn't happen again. Lots of people prefer to find the culprit or scapegoat, as if that helps anything. So that's why I didn't do that.

RE "Never give up":
I think this is a matter of perspective. I wouldn't use the term "giving up". Rather, we balanced all of our options and took the best one for everyone involved. "Pivoting" or continuing in some fashion would have been worse for everyone.

I think you've fallen into a fallacy I see a lot on HN: that making the startup work is more important than anything else.
Found ya and invited you into the beta.
What Russian Priests Drive
Take a look at what Patriarch Kirill of Moscow drives.
Would you say that the list correctly characterized Flax as being geared towards MacOS X & Linux?

My reading of your "about" page, which the list cites for that characterization, sounds more like the 1st paragraph mentioned those platforms as topics one might also see on the blog, but didn't really say anything that married Flax itself to those platforms.
Apps using that won't pass certification, but you're right you can use your own provisioned apps.
They're cheap, I admit that. But they are challenged interfacing with US clients. We've found that by giving business away (matching their rates) and delivering a few small jobs, US customers will keep coming back.

That said, there are a few good ones out there so we should keep on our toes.
I think the point of that was to show that users would get paid for looking at ads (when he turns down the ad level, there was a little thing that said "Balance" on it).
I'm of the school that measuring trivial knowledge is not a good way to identify good programmers....

I've been studying how to train novice programmers for a long time and programming even longer. Any decent Perl programmer should know the answers to these questions. (Anyone who can't answer most of these questions with ease doesn't understand the language.)

Certainly these questions are not the only questions you should ask in an interview to find the right person, but if you want to know if the interviewee understands Perl 5, these are effective questions.
That skill set is in high demand. Rather than be blocked I suggest you outsource. Find a freelancer...give him or her a test drive. Maybe they'll be your next employee.
If someone is paying me $350 to borrow my car for 15hrs, I'd be wondering where they're planning to dump the body they plan to put in my trunk.
I think Javascript performance is basically here but mostly unused, destroyed by careless abstraction.
36 battery changes later...
Thank you. :)

Unrelated to the OP:

This has surely come up before, but I haven't seen it come up since I started visiting here: why does HN not auto-link URLs in the submission (with rel="nofollow" if there are SEO concerns), instead of relying on people making "clickable" posts?
I could see potential in this to disrupt industries like roofing, skyscraper cleaning, and line maintenance.
For domain hack suggestions, I use http://domaintyper.com
I'm more minimal in my desires for IDE features. TextMate is what works best for me. It focuses on exactly what needs to be focused on: the code. Everything else, is available through Macro's, Bundles, and the like. I can't live without it.

For your thread:
* focus on text/code
* super adjustable text coloring, highlighting
* quick to launch, especially from bash (eg: "mate gdt.s")
* macro's for extended usability (running bash script on file on certain key combo)
The value of Facebook, Google, MSFT, GE, etc. also fluctuates (see stock charts) as well.

Thus I am not exactly sure what your point is; I admitted I was offering only an alternate POV.

"Facebook is not substitutable" - I am sure that 5 years ago some were saying the same about MySpace.

In fact, they were! 60 seconds of searching found me:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20061005/104155.shtml (MySpace should have been valued at $20 Billion according to Brad Greenspan)

http://www.itstheroi.com/search-engine-marketing/google-%E2%... (Google/MySpace deal to add $15 Billion to valuation of parent company News Corp.; deal is a huge setback to other sites)

http://mashable.com/2006/09/27/myspace-worth-20-billion/ (RBC analyst evaluates MySpace)

http://mashable.com/2006/07/11/myspace-americas-number-one/ (MySpace has 80% of social network traffic, Facebook < 8% )
Nope.

http://www.google.ca/search?source=ig&hl=fr&rlz=&...

Google does have some god-awful URLs though.
I enjoyed the originality and wit. In Russian language, mercykill strike you!
Now lets wait for a stream of posts titled, "How to Identify a Good X Programmer".

I would be waiting for the Python one.
Blog spam? Ad to content ratio is through the roof.
Good luck to everyone who's applying!
I don't have a Facebook account, don't want one, and even if I did have one, I wouldn't want to link it up with this service.

That may make me a luddite, a terrorist, or even a social-scrooge, but you'd think it would be worthwhile to make a minor concession to your potential customer base and allow people to create accounts without having to go through (and link them to) Facebook.
Awesome writeup, by the way, thanks for posting this!
Wow, that's . . . . not very useful.

Why not nutmeg as a comparison? Or hydraulic fluid?
Interesting as I did not know the key was left in the vehicle. Does the strong branding of the car help them out because it reduces the potential resale value? I perceive most stolen cars are "parted out", so this shouldn't matter much though.
This is an old old article. I read it many times when I was doing my CS PhD. There is a quote on initiative that always resonated with me. "The difference between people who exercise initiative and those who don't is literally the difference between night and day. I'm not talking about a 25 to 50 percent difference in effectiveness; I'm talking about a 5000-plus percent difference, particularly if they are smart, aware, and sensitive to others."
Thank goodness, the world needs more innovation.
I admit to being quite unhappy about the "collective guilt and responsibility" line - Steinberg's parents likely emigrated to the USA after 1900, thus they were never in the country when slavery was happening, so he should know better.

In my case, one side was non-slave-owning Northerners since 1729 where slavery was never legal, and the other side of my family wasn't in the USA until 1913.

So how exactly am I or any of my family culpable?

An aside: the first case in Virginia which legalized/recognized slavery under the courts, was brought by Anthony Johnson, who was able to convince the court that John Casor was his slave. Johnson, the slaveholder, was himself African :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Johnson_%28American_Col...
First off, the burden of competition is much less if you target a language other than Java. Java already has Eclipse/IntelliJ/Netbeans, all of which are pretty good. C++ has Visual Studio (Windows only) and Eclipse (which sucked last time I used it, but I've heard it's gotten better). Basically all IDEs for dynamic languages suck. IDEs for type-inferencing languages like Haskell or Ocaml could be really interesting, because you have a lot more info available at compile-time, but I haven't seen any that I liked. (Haven't tried Leksah though.)

The basic features that everybody relies on in an IDE, in rough order of how much they improve my productivity.

1. Autocompletion, including docs.
2. Syntax checking
3. Code navigation (eg. Ctrl-click to definition)
4. Integrated debugger
5. Refactoring
6. Syntax highlighting
7. Find-all-callers
8. File browsing

Also, it should start up fast and not have any noticeable delays when accessing functionality. IDEs that hang for 10 seconds while they pop up an autocompletion dialog bug the hell out of me.
A regular ball and separate kinetic energy source would be cheaper than this device. And would work better. There's no upside here.
this is the sad truth.
A focus on keyboard, not on mouse.
Crimson Editor column-mode.
Actually, you may be more right than you know (sorry). I've found this quote: "We tell the quadrotors what structure﻿ to build and they figure out the assembly plan and then build it."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W18Z3UnnS_0&feature=play...

It still doesn't look very swarm-like to me (more like some kind of planner algorithm; I know the quote implies a distributed intelligence, but look at the way they queue always in exactly the same place, do laps, etc etc), but that certainly sounds more promising.
We've got the engines but where are the games?
Further evidence of idiocy in Europe in regards to how the internet works, and prioritizing a ludicrous interpretation of 'privacy' before freedom of speech.
"...May Build Your Next House". Yea, right.
All in all it's designed to kill people in the end.
Ask HN: Facebook Apps - Develop yourself or outsource?
Let's say I have an idea for a FB App. Should I develop the app on my own or try to outsource?

I need to say that I'm sort-of a developer myself and I have CS university in my background but other then that nothing related to building FB apps.

Cheers,
Daniel
Not ready yet to apply. Looking to apply next year!
But, good luck and success for all.
More discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2107709
Also, while the article describes a reasonable way to identify programmers with Perl domain knowledge, I've rarely worked at jobs where that was "enough" to hire someone. System domain knowledge and problem domain knowledge are both at least as important as language domain knowledge.

I've never needed to hire "a Perl programmer", I've needed to hire people in much more specific categories like "someone to work on a webapp written in Perl for a travel company" - where system domain knowledge (knowing about things like SQL injection, XSS, character encoding, SOAP and it's lack of and "S", session management in http, authentication and security), and problem domain knowledge (some understanding of the travel industry, ecommerce, online credit card transactions) is at least as important as their Perl knowledge. I suspect in a lot of cases it'd be easier to buy a copy of Perl Best Practices for a candidate with strong system and problem domain knowledge but limited production Perl experience and have then thrive in the above role, compared to someone with a complete understanding of Perl's syntax and gotchas who's never worked on a consumer facing web app. By the same argument, all the ecommerce specific perl web app experience in the world won't on it's own win you a bioinformatics/data mining job (with me) over a Python or Java guy with in depth biology knowledge...

On an even higher level, it's easy to poke fun at Google/Microsofts hiring gameshow style questions, but they're trying (however badly) to identify/recognize problem solving skills, which are completely language agnostic. A solid grounding in algorithms and data structures, and the ability to do back of the envelope calculations based on reasonable assumptions/estimates (with supporting reasoning and error bounds for those estimates) is a very different skill to "just programming", and people possessing those skills, while in a small company will still be "a programmer", in a larger shop (like Google) would have a role perhaps better described as "project architect" or "system designer". Being able to answer with good explanations behind your reasoning "how many gas stations are there in America?" or "why are manhole covers round" might not be relevant if your hiring a programmer to modify Wordpress or write a Magento plugin, but people who _can_ discuss and answer those sort of questions are demonstrating a much higher level of skill than just knowing whether arrays are passed by value or reference in programming language de jour...
I was at this talk (given at CodeMash a few days ago). It spurred a lot of discussion/opposition over the fact that it revolves so heavily around only hiring passionate, rock star quality developers that care about the product you're developing.

Small companies and startups often have a product that you can recruit people who are passionate enough about the idea that stuff like this can work out. The problem for discussion is more based on which (if any) of these ideas can be applied to a large corporation where the developers are working on insurance or financial software etc.

Some things that are lost for those only reading slides:

- His main reasons behind this "DDD" policy is that it's the open source model. Developers work on things they care about, when they feel like working and then every hour they spend "working" is a valuable hour of work. Any policy that forces or even simply guilts people into a set schedule or number of hours causes unproductive time and a loss of developer happiness/autonomy.

- He strongly advocates removing money as a motivator. At github apparently every employee makes the same salary.

- The "no vacations" comment comes from him not believing you should track vacations. Employees should but trusted and able to take the time off they deem appropriate.

- At github, the Google "20% policy" is taken to an extreme. People can work on whatever they want on "company time".
Once GPS gets sub-meter accuracy, then we should start worrying.

Or once the kinect shrinks to size of a short stack of quarters.
Anyone else notice the mention of Randy Pausch? Quite sure this article was before he became famous for his "Last Lecture"
This article is full of excellent advice- anybody out there thinking about a PhD would be well-advised to read it, and pay especially close attention to the part about figuring out why you want the PhD.
Perhaps 5 years ago, MySpace was similarly difficult to substitute (I don't know). What I think I do know is that it would be riotously hard to bring a substitute for Facebook to the market. At its peak, MySpace had 1/6th the users Facebook had.
Next I want these drones to make hexagonal structures and feed off of flower polen.
Holding down a button overlays a line over the logical "path" to help code comprehension.
I've started making sn effort to do the opposite. I work sitting down, and do all my idol browsing, email, video watching standing up while using an iPad. So working is the relaxing part of my day.
It means that Netscape ignored the idea of separating markup from style, probably setting back the progress of the web by some years. This seems to imply that Andreessen's vision of the web was not very ambitious at the time - mixing FONT and CENTER tags is convenient for small-scale publishing by individuals handcoding one-off HTML, but is unwieldy for larger scale ideas.
Hello, Daniel.
I think that you should develop it yourself, or find a partner who may develop it.
I think when you start an app, you need to be fast to change, and envolve. So, if you have a outsorce development team, you may loose those things.
And, as you have a CS background, you will learn fast how to build an app.
It was big in 2008, Marsh. We're not a SCADA specialty firm, and we ended up doing SCADA-related work in 2008, and in 2007, and in 2006. One of my BigCo enterprise clients hired a network security guy --- network security, not software --- from a pure-play SCADA software security consultancy.
Why Nobody Uses Opera
We added two new questions this year: Why did you pick this project to work on? and How will you get users? In retrospect it's surprising we didn't already ask these. (When reading applications we found we were trying to reconstruct answers to them from the answers people gave to other questions.)

We also stopped describing the video as optional. In practice it wasn't.
Any good sources or eBook themed trackers you can recommend?
Manage multiple Heroku environments w/ Katana
Any ads for those?
Why not take a functional approach with JS as opposed to OO?

I do agree with the article in the importance of learning javaScript though as I'm in the midst of a few thousand lines of js (using backbone.js) to bring real power to the browser side (with a Lisp backend).
> I find it a little bit troublesome that the group that follows 'hacker' news is so willingly supportive of blatant technical misinformation.

I don't think anyone here is saying that W3Schools is tits, or that it disseminates valid tutorials or code.

I'm a little confused as to why W3Schools is being singled out among many crap tutorial sites. I know that you claim Google placement and bullshit certifications are your driving reasons, but I have a little trouble believing that.

The Internet is organic, and the very fact that W3Schools still exists today is more of an indicator that nothing better exists. W3Fools isn't webstandards.org and you're not Zeldman.

You've possibly wasted your time creating a site that ridicules rather than one that educates. Your site begs for applause from the knowing and shows up dead last for a user looking for quick tutorials.

> I'm not sure the last time you built a website to scale and to the breadth of information that's found on w3schools (valid or not), but it takes a hell of a lot longer than a week.

Most everyone would agree with that, but you gave yourself your own deadline, no? Who said W3Fools had to launch at a specific date? And why? W3Fools could have been called HitTheGroundRunning.org and started off with CSS3 or HTML5 tutorials. A month or so in and you'd have a real thoughtful and useful resource. Then scaled up based on user feedback.
"After all, you wouldn't want to jump into Scala without learning Java first." Anyone have any opinions on this? I've never learned Scala but I didn't think Dojo : JavaScript as Scala : Java.
A weird cross-sell.
The American version of the BBC website, bbcamerica.com, is devoted to entertainment for the most part. Scrolling the top are plugs for The Tudors, Ramsay's Best Restaurant and Anglophenia.

As far as I know, the BBC News site for us yanks is identical to the version served to you in the UK. I don't believe bbc.co.uk uses geolocation content filtering or modification. bbc.com and bbc.co.uk appear to be resolving to the same address as well.

bbc.co.uk does have "Battles in Tunis as key aide held" as its top story as I write this, so it is not like Americans are blocked from seeking out information using the same sources as the rest of the world.
I would suggest creating 1 or 2 simple FB apps like quiz, gifts etc to get the feel of developing FB Apps. Firstly, you will learn about FB API's, secondly you can gauge how easy/hard it is to develop and accordingly do a cost analysis between self developing versus outsourcing. And, even if you outsource it, you would be able to maintain/fix bugs locally.
Do More Online By Doing More Offline
I often encounter links to LJ here, at HN. One-two a week.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=ru&q=site%3Anews.ycombin...

So maybe LJ isn't all that teenage goth for hackers.
Good lord, do people still not know enough to pay their interns?

Unpaid internships at American startups almost certainly violate federal labor laws, since one of the criteria for exemption from the Fair Labor Standards Act is that the company get 'no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees'. Aside from the 'compliance with bureaucratic legalese' issue, unpaid internships are exploitation, plain and simple.

Minimum wage isn't that much. Pay your interns.
Wondering if we should apply even though we got rejected for the winter cycle ...
Man, I was at CodeMash, but missed that keynote since I had to run an errand over lunch (kinda needed new hearing aid batteries). I'm kinda bummed that I missed it given the volume of discussion that it generated.

Did you happen to hit Joe Nuxoll's user experience session on Friday? That was probably the high point of the conference for me -- tons of useful info.
Redirect a running process output to a file and log out
Hi Zeuf..
You really make a great point there. I haven't thought about how dynamic an app must be.

Thanks for the advice.
You are welcome to submit a pull request with fixes Isofarro:

https://github.com/paulirish/w3fools
Since Greg Perry worked at the same firm as Jason Wright, it's not particularly hard to see how he might opt to "finger" him.

Plenty of people were pentesting SCADA in 2006. Are you kidding? Robert Graham and David Maynor (!) gave a SCADA talk as ISS at Black Hat in 2006. Trust me, you haven't found much of a coincidence with the SCADA angle.
Firefox also doesn't like giving exclusive arrow key controls or blocking find as you type.
Looking forward to applying for the first time. Any advice for a first timer?
http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html
Who covers maintenance?

Who covers the cost (often quite high) of fixing/cleaning dings, dents, rips, missing/broken parts, broken headrests, dog hair, dirt (from plants?), gum, and other such things?

These are car maintenance issues I see all the time when using both Zipcar and CityCarShare. If I had a personal car, I'd flip if it was subjected to the level of abuse that these fleet cars are -- the depreciation due to wear and tear would be significant.

[Edit] Since I got downvoted to 0 (and have no idea why), I'll expand on the relevant answers I found in the FAQ:

What if my car is returned dirty?

Renters are required to be responsible and keep
the car as clean as possible. At the end of every
rental, you can rate the user and leave feedback.
If they return it in a dirty condition, you should
note this when leaving feedback.

The owner is out the cleaning fee and time to do it (if it can even be cleaned). CityCarShare records people who leave the car dirty, too, but it doesn't stop people from dirtying up the cars.

... actually, that's the only FAQ item I can find on the subject. The cars are insured, but what's the deductible? Who pays it? Is the insurance company really going to pay out a claim for a broken headrest, a ripped seat, or a ruined floor mat?
NPR, New York Times, etc. also covering it.
Aliens vs Human Intelligence
We often fund people on their second or third try. Dropbox was Drew Houston's second try. I believe PagerDuty holds the record; that company was their fourth.
Who do you think comprise the biggest funders this sort of research?
Ask HN:Review my app Dawg - social aggregator
Hi All , It's my first attempt on my own. I left job in last quarter to follow my heart. I slogged hard, kept myself motivated and developed a very simple social reader for android phones and tablets.
1. It aggregates your Facebook, Twitter accounts at one place but keeps feeds from each networks separated. (Unlike existing products in market) 2. Well supported for android tablets. 3. Less number of clicks and uses gestures for quick glance. 3. Seamlessly updates with real time notifications. 4. Allows you to update with your location as well as post photos.

I am launching it early and want to learn more from you people prior to launch in android market. I need your feedback to improve the product and serve better.

You can signup for beta and view screen shots of application at http://zubhalabs.com/