skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disliked the comment as well.

But I honestly think it's not as bad as you make it out to be. Remember, Paul Carr basically makes a living talking about himself, including talking (at length) about his antics, especially while drinking. He also publicly announced his decision to stop drinking, and brings it up quite a lot.

I wouldn't go around referring to him as an ex-alcoholic, especially not in such a way, but Paul Carr has definitely made discussions of the subject relevant to more people than his immediate family.
This userscript can do the job in the meantime: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33156
Amy Chua would be proud ;).

Congrats Mark! I'm always happy to see young entrepreneurs do well.
I suppose it's politically incorrect to say this, but perhaps it was terrorism and it was meant to be found out eventually, as a warning?

In any case, some people would argue that being good enough to get the job done is good enough, regardless of elegance.
(nbpoole, I think Reddit-like humour is wasted here on HackerNews.)
Scala is not meant for you..
No problem, thanks for seeing the humor in it unlike some other hN readers ;)
Armadillo Aerospace to launch The Stig to 30km
just to be clear, jsdom is not a parser. By default it uses node-htmlparser which is not very lenient.

Have you tried using Aria's html5 parser? I hear it works better with malformed markup.
If your code is covered with tests, why would you be afraid of rewriting it?
Is there anything inherently good about being bootstrapped apart from the story?

Well, the first point is obvious - should you eventually sell it, your ownership will be higher if you haven't taken outside investment.

Depending on how the money is raised (convertible debt? purchasing common stock? purchasing preferred stock?), your investor will also have a variety of rights relating to the control of the business, which can potentially constrain you down the road.

Taking $100K in convertible debt is a lot easier to stomach than taking $100K and issuing a bunch of preferred stock for it.
The Time Has Come For The College Entrepreneur
I just found fbreader in the package manager which seems to work fine.
Seattle Activist Wins Case Against TSA
Really? I'd expect a startup employee to be more interested in, ah, 'extracting value' than a regular employee. I mean, you've gotta have /some/ reward for all that risk.

(I mean, it's different if it's a company that wouldn't have paid a headhunter anyhow; but I think the grandparent was objecting to the difference between what you are paying the headhunter and what you are paying the employee, more than the absolute amount you are paying.)
If the semantics are identical, you don't need to rewrite them, a good IDE will do that for you with a simple code reformat whenever you happen to be doing work in that file.
I'm exactly in the same position as you. I have very little funds and I'm very good at programming.

If anyone could advise on the matter, it would actually be useful. Getting things viral is not as easy as it looks.

If you want, you can check out my project - http://twtquiz.com
Aside (but relevant): some countries have as an explicit rule, that if you get a letter from the IRS on an issue, both you (as someone who has to comply with the law) and the IRS itself, is bound by the interpretation that is given.

In the USA, even if you get a private ruling, the IRS can decide to renege on their advice at any time, and investigate you and charge you, making you pay penalties and fines for following their own advice.

These ambiguities and "tricks" could be cleared up with simple guidelines backed up by such private rulings; however that would not be in the best interest of our "gotcha now!" system of taxation.
Bootstrapping From Arizona To $36M Series A Valuation
Nah. Prison systems have a much more narrow definition of what constitutes a religion. Some have a pre-defined list of approved religions. Religions usually must be established and organized.
Can you type "fluently" on an iPad, enough to write long messages (i.e code) without getting irritated?
You could already remove sites from your search results when you are logged into gmail. This would be an extension of the feature, like if many people are removing results from their search then maybe put them at the bottom or give them lower rank.. interesting
You can't know that. Reading is highly dependent on your perception of the activity. If you were conditioned to believe that learning is something that happens mostly in a classroom, then you'll perceive a book as "1000 pages to go through", a hurdle.

On the other hand, if you're conditioned to believe and trust in the transmission of knowledge through independent reading, like most autodidacts are, you perceive them as an opportunity to improve.

I, myself, am an autodidact programmer. I had never heard of many resources before encountering them in threads on HN, Reddit, or Stackoverflow. I haven't read all books, or followed all the videos, but at least, now that I'm aware of them, it prompted me to start working toward shifting a few things in my life to allow me the time and opportunity to dig deeper in the material.

It's a process.
On the other hand, that same path has shown to be quite problematic, right? Lets say you have 10000 verticies, that's 10000 function calls to make. Sure, you could precompile a display list, or use some other work around, but we've finally come to the point where it is not fast enough anymore. Welcome to opengl 4, i'll miss the easy to understand glBegin blocks.
Displays Booking Availability with Ajax Availability Calendar
The Ajax Availability Calendar is a php script designed to show availability of whatever you might need it for (eg. holiday cottage, hotel rooms etc.).
I started 10 years ago at school. My first language was VB6 and I learned from my school teacher and some books.

Nowadays I do mainly PHP
young entrepreneur, impressive track record, prominent hn member...i could imagine some people caring.
I just got eager to create a simple game at an age of 15. Then I started to learn PHP and Mysql. At first, it was hard. But most importantly - it was interesting.

And learning was like this:

1) Reading a book and reading tutorials online

2) Asking question in forums

3) And asking people through skype. Half of them blocked me :) However, it was worth.

Good luck and don't give up when you face a problem.
Qwiki's value is no longer in its website because the overall Qwiki site is not too complex, but the value lies within its brand. Winning the TechCrunch award, Qwiki is like TechCrunch/AOL's baby. they talk about it 24/7. Free publicity. 2ndly people know about Qwiki, it is now a person's first instinct when they see a Qwiki type of interactive website. Not everyone knows the site, but for those who does, interactive wiki is forever labeled as "Qwiki". That's something hackers cannot clone.
Honestly, there is really no easy way to market, with or without money. The cheapest, and honestly the best way, is to be personally recognized.

You'll notice that once people break through to the public sphere of whatever niche they are in, anything they do seems to get instant traction. While a lot of people stumble into their status, there is a systematic way of getting there.

I could spend hours talking to you about blogging and making an name for yourself, since I am currently a PR student,but the fact remains, there is no easy way to gain traction. Everything you will do (paid or not) will take time and dedication to get right.

Another way to gain some initial users is to make it viral in your own personal sphere. If you are in High School, make it big within your High School. Remember, the virility of something refers to how "contagious" is it, not how many people pick it up. Lots of immensely popular companies started locally (See Facebook and Ben & Jerry's).

Anyways, hope that helps.
My bathroom could use a retiling...
This project looks very good. I think you can really succeed. Good luck.
I do. It's interesting to learn about the people behind their work, even if they achieve moderate success. You can learn a lot from them.

I have lots of respect for Mark. He's able to just crank apps out and get things done.

Edit: For anyone wondering, the comment basically said "who cares?"
Start a blog and write articles (preferably something related to your target market/product). You also might want to make a twitter account.

When you have no money, marketing will take time.
Hiring friends-of-friends seems rather common actually, especially for startups and small companies. (This is the whole reason why people join LinkedIn, right?) From the job seekers' point-of-view, this is "It's not what you know, it's who you know." I'm all for recommendations, but sometimes it seems it's more about networking (i.e. having a good friend refer you) than about your actual skills. There are probably plenty of talented people out there who just don't have the right connections to get jobs.
Ask HN: What is my job title?
I have been employed by the same outfit for nearly 10 years doing many things. So much so that I really don't know what my job title is anymore. Every couple of years or so, our HR department changes my title (and that my colleagues) but it still does not "fit".

Since I started this job, I have:

-written database stored procedures to update data-stores and create user reports
-taught myself Bash and wrote shell scripts as wrappers to stored procedures, bulk loaders
-taught myself Java and wrote singleton classes for data extraction of hashed data off CMOS hardware and user report generation
-converted singleton classes into runnable classes using server API against Quartz for job scheduling.
-maintained and enhanced C based application for AP/AR reconciliation process.
-taught myself procedural PHP and created web based application to facilitate logging of user report requests across 5 departments in 3 US states.
-Currently converting same application to CakePHP
-Created Knowledge Base for field technicians using jQueryUI,

This short list does not include writing specs, documenting SOPs, dealing with vendors and executives, of course.

I am thinking that I am a programmer analyst but isn't it too vague? What is my job title?
This comment is really mean spirited.
would have paid for this
They shut down, here's the story from the founder: http://www.quora.com/Is-Lotus-Vodka-going-out-of-business
Amazon Targets Grocery Sector With Free Delivery
There is an updated version of this talk:

http://www.dabeaz.com/generators-uk/index.html

Also, more interesting talks from the same author:

http://www.dabeaz.com/talks.html
Really? Every job I applied to out of school (software) asked for my GPA, and many of the internships (quantitative finance) for my SATs. Of course it becomes less important a few years out, so I hope you're not talking about that.
It seems that pipeline-style programming is now popular in many modern programming languages, for example C# (with Linq), F# (with the |> pipe operator and the Seq module), and Ruby and JS+jQuery (with method chaining).

I really wish Python had some syntactic feature that encourages this style, doing "gen_cat(gen_open(gen_find(...)))" is rather cumbersome, compared to "gen_find(...) | gen_open | gen_cat".

Of course you can override __or__ like some libraries do, but it is not the One Way To Do It...
US Diplomacy Embracing Twitter Amid Global Crises
Yes, because they won't be running there. Maybe you like to target one version back, but there's a lot of systems out there running old Perls, and I don't see why I shouldn't be writing for the largest audience possible.
Tech startups are about the tech.

What we need is a better word for startups on Techcrunch. "CRUD app + Graphics" or "local social 2.0 buzzword-compliant little companies"

While I think they are great (and I use and recommend their product) I don't see Wufoo as a "tech" company. They're like Zappos -- a Customer Service company that happens to be run from a website. That isn't a 'tech' company. It's just a company. Having a Building/shopfront and selling shoes doesn't make you a "real estate" company.

Tech Startups are startups taht actually have a technology to sell or a massive technological innovation.
Companies like Isilon (had a $2.25B exit last year), or Google or Netscape or PrimeSense.
Mark has been an active member of this community for 3 years. So while it might not be of interest to someone who wandered in from Techcrunch two months ago, some people are interested in a story about someone they've seen on HN for a long time.
"FT.com articles are only available to registered users and subscribers."

What?

Edit: oh, it works if your referrer is Google instead of HN.
I know of some sites that started organically and grew because there was need/demand for it. If you regularly participate on email lists, it is usually ok to put a link to your site in the signature block. Same with a lot of forums. (On Hacker News, you could put the link in your profile.) As long as you are a genuinely participating, regular member and they have no reason to think you are simply spamming them, this shouldn't be a problem. Then try to not talk incessantly about your site. For the most part, just participate as usual and let people check it out if they find something you say interesting. Mention the site where it is pertinent to the conversation.

This is probably not a way to get big traffic quickly. But if you regularly develop the site so that there is new content frequently, it can become a fairly high traffic site over time. This method gets some traffic for a couple of my sites where the goal was to share information and there wasn't a business goal or financial goal at the outset. I am real bad about not putting up new content very often. The following for my sites has grown very, very slowly. But for the particular sites in question, I think that is okay and will likely change as I get to the point where I am ready and able to update them more regularly.

Good luck and wishing you many excellent answers from other members. :-)
Ask HN: Did you watch the Crunchies? What did you think of it?
So last night I decided to stay in, order some Chinese food and watched the Crunchies... My friends won't understand but it's fine haha. What did you guys think of the Crunchies this year? I thought it was certainly better than last year, but something still seemed to be missing ~~ what are your thoughts?
That's a great advice. I will make brochures and give it for my classmates and all people in school. It should be fun :D
There was never anything conclusive. It was all accusations by from various sources, hearsay and circumstantial evidence, non of it ever backed up by any evidence that actually held up.
I'm not advocating replacement of income tax with higher sales tax; just answering your question.

I wouldn't consider myself the most knowledgeable on this issue but I think there's an argument for a system that doesn't tax certain basis necessities and offers compensation to the poor to allow for more than just an existence.
How to Make a Man Fall in Love with Me - 5 Tips for Women
If you've been involved with a man and you couldn't understand his feelings for you and you are wondering how to make a man fall in love with you. Do you know you have the power to make him fall for you?
And then the GBL gets deployed by Spamhaus.
By that same logic, I should never do business with you because I find your opinion close-minded and should express that you shouldn't comment if you are not going to try to at least have a sense of humor.
First, a question: why do you care? Are you trying to put your CV together, after 10 years at the same place?

Second: your job title is whatever HR says it is, much as your address is whatever the post office says it is.

That being said-- based on the list of tasks you itemized, "Programmer/Analyst" seems to fit. In what way do you find that vague?
For a math whiz, SICP should be an option.
You're right that giving the OpenGL runtime information piecemeal (one vertex at a time, repeated every frame) is no longer acceptable for many apps in terms of performance, but I'd argue that that's not a strike against the abstraction layer per se. We've gone to a world where the code I posted was the only way to go, to a world where that works but is slow, and people who care about performance use display lists and vertex buffers and shading languages. However, most graphics code still feels like it's about graphics -- vertices, triangles, groups of triangles that share properties, lighting, shading -- and not about the registers you need to poke to set up the rasterizer on such-and-such chip, or how to optimally pipeline shaders to get the best hardware utilization.

The abstractions we have now are more complex than ever, but they are still, for the most part, in the problem domain -- it is possible to do weird things to your code for performance tuning, but it's just not possible to go as far with it as you can for a machine whose behavior is specified and guaranteed at a very low level.
This a route I took last year for a client. I self represented and the clerks at the courthouse were friendly and helped where they could. In North Carolina, the cap for small claims action is $5000. Once my case was heard, it took 10 minutes between the start and a judgement in my favor. From start to finish though it took two months so as to serve a summons properly and allow time to appeal the judgement.

It helps if you've received checks from the company previously and can give the bank account information to a sheriff to collect for you.
I guess I should have added:

0.a. Get a legally binding signature and include a written-only clause. Make it crystal clear that if something doesn't appear in that definition of services that everybody signed and that has a price tag on it, that it isn't covered by that price tag.

I've translated roughly 3.2 million contracts for services since switching from programming to translation, and I'm pretty sure I could survive as a programmer now, just from that alone.
I'd wager the opposite. People looking up information like to scan well presented text, not watch a slide show.
Minimum viable product

http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/03/minimum-viable-...
Interesting. I've worked on SuperFetch and I didn't know that!
I applaud your optimism and suspect we see things for ourselves in a similar light. However, every improvement of this sort added to a language is like a feature added to a product. It is not "free:" It increases the surface area of the language, requiring programmers to learn more to use it. Every "improvement" must be analyzed in light to whether the benefits outweigh the costs. My conjecture is that the costs will outweigh the benefits for the kilo-jillions of shops that are "mystery corporations with slaving programmers," as you put it.

As an aside, I think that the complexity of the language is already getting out of hand. Although features like this can be found in "little" languages like Javascript, they were in from the beginning and form part of the language's substrate. Libraries, frameworks, everything a Javascript user touches will make use of anonymous functions with lexical scope. More complex features are built on these features. This matters because when a programmer learns how a function works in Javascript, he learns how everything works.

Whereas when adding the same feature to Java, it's just being bolted on the side. So when a programmer learns how these new so-called closures work, all he learns is about a feature that isn't being used as a component of anything else, it's just a feature. We add complexity but get very little in return, much less than from the same feature in a language like Javascript.

I am not trying to get into a flame-fest over Java, but I do think that there comes a time when any product matures, and "improvements" should be viewed with extreme caution because the product has reached a point of greatly diminishing returns. I suggest that Java is in that place.
Chromium OS – another look 1 year on
Maintaining One Code Base with Possibly Conflicting Custom Features
Personally, I think the reasoning is completely bogus, however, I'm all for not allowing people to spend their day playing D&D while I and other tax payers pay for it (and I'll expand the D&D to anything that does not fall in the restitution or rehabilitation buckets).

On the other hand, I could see D&D being a good rehabilitation tool.

Personal rant aside, D&D sure seems like it would be a LOT better than some things I've read about in prison, but I also don't know the dynamics of prison life. Maybe the hierarchy of thugdom exhibits in potentially anything with a "leader" there.
I never understood the age thing. I guess in times long ago age might have mattered, but now with such ease of access to the internet for most there are people who are at 18 more experienced (like Mark) than some 30 year olds, so what Mark has achieved (while fantastic) could be more impressive if it was done by a 30 year old who had less access to the resources Mark has used... does that make sense?
Any idea where I can watch the archives?
What I did was sending them a tweet, and got into the beta within hours ;)

TestFlight rocks, especially when you have a lot of apps on the App Store.

EDIT: AppSendr looks gorgeous.
I'm not a programmer but I still think I have something to share.

When I was 16 (ten years ago) I had an IRC channel about a very specific genre of music. I thought it would be cool to also have a website about it. So I used one of those geocities type of services to host my first website. I started doing reviews and listing upcoming concerts and stuff like that and soon I found my self maintaining a music website (rather than an IRC channel website). I started learning HTML & CSS, reading A List Apart and articles by Zeldman, Bowman, Mayer Molly and 456bereastreet. That's when I really got into web standards (when CSS Zen garden was created) and unfortunately started focusing more on the technology rather than the contents of my site.

When I was at uni. I dropped my side-project due to studying and stuff but kept reading & learning about what's going on. That was ~2004 when table-less designs were all the rage. To some extend I regret focusing more on the technology (HTML, CSS, Javascript) instead of my goal (the music website) but I'm glad that I really know "how to make websites".
Yes, this is similar to what I wrote above. And the problem is even older than PHP. For as long as I can think back there have always been people clicking every colorful link saying "Click here! It's FREE!" and "Download for Free!". Back then the nasty payload came from cracked software and games, stuff like boot sector viruses. I wouldn't put the blame for this on assembly language.
Please do. I would join it in a heart beat.
There are people that like working on things the rest of the world views as "accomplishments" even without parental pressure, y'know...
Actually it's even simpler than that.

Express interest

That's all you need. Go up to a person and say Hi. Then express genuine interest in what they have to say, or at least fake it well enough.

Then don't make the mistake I usually make, don't stop being interested. Everything a deep and long-lasting networking connection is, is the fact you actively kept in touch.

Yes, we're engineers, no this isn't easy. But you just have to do it.

/me should really start making a habit of keeping in touch
I could see it being a great app on Motorola's Atrix with dock (laptop or "desktop") once that comes out.
Misadventure, a little game based on Faux+Backbone.js