skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This makes something like Mixtent.com more valuable...since you now have people vouching for developers/companies, you could probably do the same thing for places to work.
MyRegistry has done this, the big thing they haven't done it price comparison, and their design is absolutely begging for someone to do it better. We were on HN a few days ago, and hoping to do just that. We let users price compare while also integrating with traditional registries (registrystop). http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2136619
Thats still not an insignificant amount of time/effort. I'd love to see someone do this though!
http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/22/why-advertising-is-failing-...

(Techcrunch, I know. But it's a really good article from an academic.)

From the article:
People don’t trust ads. There is a vast literature to support this. Is it all wrong?

People don’t want ads. Again, there is a vast literature to support this. Think about your own behavior, you own channel surfing and fast forwarding and the timing of when you leave the TV to get a snack. Is it during the content or the commercials?

People don’t need ads. There is a vast amount of trusted content on the net. Again, there is literature on this. But think about how you form your opinion of a product, from online ads or online reviews?

There is no shortage of places to put ads. Competition among them will be brutal. Prices will be driven lower and lower, for everyone but Google.

Also, don't forget that the NYTimes is instituting a paywall, and the Wall Street Journal already has one. These sites obviously couldn't function solely on ads, and they get massive amounts of traffic. Likewise for Hulu: they couldn't get by with ads alone either. Unless your web business has an extremely low overhead (read: simple web functions) I seriously doubt ads will be enough.
Agreed. Regardless of who acquired who on paper, the NeXT acquisition catapulted Apple from being just an interesting entry in history books (like Gulf Oil) to one of the writers of history (like Standard Oil).
Great job!
Site review :-
* Clean and neat!
* Easy to get started <1min to create account to a baby registry.

Feature request :-
* Would love more info about the item in line.
* Who is buying what (if it is socially acceptable!) as I might team up with a friend but not with a stranger.
* Baby journals et. al.

Other helpful info for you:-
* Did you knew about http://www.thebump.com ?
* Thebump has reading info + baby name help + videos + registry.

A question to you:-
Now that you know about a site which has already solved same problem as you, would you still pursue this idea? If yes then what will be the thought process?

With every idea I start hacking with I tend to over research and find a solution and then steam goes off! I want other people's experience with this phenomenon who tend to overcome this.
How Not to hire an iPhone dev consultant / A challenge for a great OpenGL dev
> Readers thought the concept was funny enough

Some readers did. Some readers thought the concept was offensive, that Penny Arcade was throwing gasoline on the flames with the Dickwolves t-shirt, and that there still hasn't really been an apology.
Not entirely relevant, but sort of:

"More millionaires are made in their 50s than any other decade." (From Dave Ramsey: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,426043,00.html)

If 'startup' to you means 21 year olds drinking beer in a studio and living on ramen noodles and pizza, then yeah, you're WAY too old (what are you even doing READING this site?).

If 'startup' means a way of you controlling your destiny, making a difference in your life and the lives of others, being creative, and following your passions, then you're not too old.
Never too old ... my partner is 38 and I am 46. Physical age is not that important as long as you have the drive and desire in you.
Comments like these make me wish HN had a save feature. Thanks, you just got bookmarked.
It's not flash?
Instagram CEO: 'The Best Products In The World Start Out As Features' [video]
They could have posted the question onto a site like stackoverflow.
I'll be 29 in a couple of months. Started programming in high school but didn't get really serious about it till college. Have been working professionally for 6 years. Overall I'm proud of what I've accomplished but after scouring this site for even my limited amount of time, I wonder if I've been slacking too much as I don't consider myself a senior developer. Some days I wonder if I'll feel like I'll ever reach that point, given just how much there is to know out there.
You might want to run some exploding ads, or bouncing burger ads. I think your on to something. :-)
drop shadows on body text is the new rounded corners.
[pedantic]: you should use '0', not 0x30.

1. The standard library C function atoi may be named 'ASCII to integer', but it should convert a numerical string in the platform's encoding to integer. For symmetry, itoa should convert an integer to a platform encoded numeric string, not to an ASCII numerical string.

2. Not all computers use ASCII for C strings. Because of that, '0' need not equal 0x30. For example, in EBCDIC, one has '0' == 0xF0.

Utterly pedantic: IIRC, the C standard guarantees that '0' through '9' are contiguous and in order. If you know better, or aren't sure, use "0123456789"[i] to convert a 0...9 value to the corresponding char.
If working for/with Google is the goal, I feel like it would be much more worthwhile and possibly significantly increase the chances of working for/with them to create a startup in an area you know Google is looking. Much easier said than done, but something tells me this approach would be much more likely to get their attention... plus, you'd probably get a hefty chunk of change should you join forces.
Facebook Directory with personal phone no.
I did the backend stuff, but wrote a lot of the jsp pages as well. It is all Java/J2EE/JBoss/EJB3/Hibernate with some fairly complicated single sign on stuff going on to allow cross domain auto-login.
Even assuming that you're not a bad hire, it can still be a bad idea to allow this. If the decision makers can go over the heads of the people who are in charge of technical hiring and force them to take on someone they haven't vetted then that's just going to cause resentment.

I don't mind skipping HR so much. But skipping the technical-vetting step is bad. If your hiring-committee doesn't make good decisions, that's a separate problem that you should solve without just starting to ignore them.
Even if it's not allowed, you could always hire the person on a contract basis for the trial period. Then offer a full employment agreement after that.
What makes you say that? We haven't seen anything to indicate Google search pages are in the Bing index.
Is there any argument to be made regarding the quality of UX/engineering at facebook vs. myspace. I love using FB and cringe everytime I need to go onto myspace.
Yesterday, I shared what has been deemed the "4-hour startup" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2173155), which was really just a little project I threw together that happened to have a significant amount of immediate success. There were lots of HN members asking about certain aspects of the project, and I absolutely plan on giving back to the community by sharing everything I did to bring the project to life. This is the first post of several in which I'll explain my steps, methods, and thought processes. I answered a bunch of questions in the original thread, but I think these posts will make things much clearer. Hope they help somebody!
I think /64 was the guideline for the smallest divisible network an ISP should hand out. It basically allows for a household or organization to grow indefinitely while assigning anything that can hook up to the network a real IP address, with little restrictions on topology and/or address allocation layout. No need to reuse the addresses either, just give the new device a new one.

EDIT: I forgot to add that it also allows network devices to use their 64-bit link layer (ethernet/MAC) address as a host identifier.
Don't Make Me Steal
It's a pretty vicious cycle. Financial websites and TV shows are mostly subsidized by brokerages or firms that make more money when you trade more, so (surprise!) they advocate trading as much as possible. It drives me nuts that in order to uncover information about investing responsibly, you have to dig past a bunch of short-term garbage that's going to give most of your money to a broker, mutual fund, or advisor.
UPDATE: Kenneth Cole has officially removed his Tweet & posted an ACTUAL apology. Only 5 hours later w/ "sincere" apology.

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=9291921501&topic=1...
It typically does, particularly if they can speak directly to your work. To get an interview it's typically more important that you could be a really good fit for the exact job, too.
It was unnecessarily intense and left me a very precocious child who was always lonely.

I would never subject my (potential) children to my childhood.

It gave me a boost in my career and programming, but that's nothing that can't be overcome with a marginal gap in work ethic.

That said, I was very fortunate to be able to crawl out of the lower classes.
> Not shown: 1000s of goofy iphone apps that generated close to $0

that's why I sometimes just hate the appstore (and humanity). when a shitty 10 minute app tops the charts and projects that people (read me) spent months on are somewhere @place 1000.
56-60 Senior Software Engineer, still enjoying coding, hacking and figuring things out. Don't spend much energy on the good ole days, whatever they were. Still prefer C over everything else. Question: What is the best programming language? Answer: Whatever the client was sold on at the trade show. Wrote a really nice bash shell web scraper yesterday. Amazing to still get so much mileage out of sed,awk,grep, and others. All I did was setup a windows share and mounted the filesystem in ubuntu. I like the idea that there are so any platforms around and no one way to do anything. Tonight Labview and robot vision to do line following.
I'm happy to talk to anyone interested in writing it.
Glad to hear I'm not the only one to do it as a hobby in their twenties. I'm 21 now, about to graduate from college with a Creative Writing degree of all things, and only started programming about a month ago. I just had an idea for a project, and started teaching myself how to do it. I'm surprised by how much fun it is, despite the challenges, and how many hours I've wound up programming every day since I started. (I also feel really lucky to have tools like Stack Overflow to help me out as a beginner.)
Here's the quote:

"I apologize to everyone who was offended by my insensitive tweet about the situation in Egypt. I’ve dedicated my life to raising awareness about serious social issues, and in hindsight my attempt at humor regarding a nation liberating themselves against oppression was poorly timed and absolutely inappropriate."

Kenneth Cole, Chairman and Chief Creative Officer
no offense of course but, it frightens me that this is even a serious question
There's a lot of stuff I can do in 5 minutes. On occasion I've only done 5 minutes "real work" in a day.

What you're paying for tho' is my 20 years experience, and in those 5 minutes I was composing a command line for a tool that I've spent 5 years working on. Bargain?
Interesting that there are 10 year olds.
What's the harm in trying? If they laugh and think it's dumb, oh well, they probably would have done the same for your resume, if they even see it. At least it's different from the man resumes and emails they will receive.
How do you come up with an idea?
There is a popular belief that ideas are worthless and implementation is everything. However, it seems that for me, coming up with a good idea is more difficult than its implementation. How do you get your inspirations for ideas?
Darn, that was supposed to be an upvote :-|

HN really needs a way to correct votes. The arrows are hideously small on an iPhone.
Having low quality non-working code is a detriment to the ecosystem because you have to go through the whole list of questions in the article to figure this out. So, I think it's better for non-quality code to not be released. This difference is part of what is making Apple very successful in their app market.
I doubt that anyone, considering how much overhead there is in dealing with a government procurement process, charging anywhere like a reasonable hourly rate, could do it for significantly less.

Oh what, you wanted to be paid to attend that two hour meeting on diversity? Well sorry...
When we deployed it, I started by adding only the overhead (output buffering and storing the output in a tree to render it later) throughout the entire codebase. When I benchmarked the before/after of this step, the performance difference on our pages wasn't measurable, it was within the margin of error. Which means that it was all gain from then on when we started using it to really save time on the DB and cache.

It's impossible for me to compare right now between using it and not using on a given page, because it requires so much rewriting and change in the way you structure parts of the code that you can't just turn it on or off.

I think the best way to compare would be to fork an open-source framework to use that technique and then look at the difference in CPU and memory usage to run the same site. I wish I had time to do that kind of tedious research for an article, but I don't... My goal was merely to share the idea, I'd be thrilled if someone picks it up and does an implementation that everyone can measure.

I developed that technology over months on a constantly shifting closed source codebase with 20+ developers committing code daily, that's another reason why comparing before/after is a bit difficult to achieve sometimes. Deploying that tech was a massive task itself, very far from a single source branching.

If I had to guess, I'd say that PHP memory usage would be increased, but not by much. After all you're only storing as much data as your final page HTML output - generally you want to keep that to a small size - plus some very small objects. However if your traditional MVC framework was already doing a lot of output buffering, there might not be a difference, the buffering is just moved to this new technique. As for CPU, I don't think it would be noticeable, we're just adding things to a small tree then traversing it once.

I think what is most wasteful about out implementation is the little extra code it creates to deal with datex instead of just echoing content. That's why I mention in the article that this would be better if handled at the language level, where all the concerns about memory and CPU could be highly optimized, in addition to benefiting from lighter syntax.
How did you remove the title from GMail so that only the favicon displays?
But less surprising given that a lot of your traffic is from HN :)
I think somebody should buy old Virb (before their last two pivots, when it was a well designed myspace) and rebrand it as MySpace.
I use a crude script to make a custom hash of a password

http://dpaste.com/hold/382522/

I use the two arguments: a master password, and a common name. I only know one of my passwords off the top of my head.
Performance Innumeracy & False Positives
FireCSS - See CSS edits in all browsers
Benchmark.js (http://benchmarkjs.com), which jsPerf uses, does checks the UA string as well as feature tests for various environments. You can check the code out at https://github.com/mathiasbynens/benchmark.js/blob/master/be....

Here is a MSDN post that examines some of the platform tokens http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537503(VS.85).aspx
Blogspam that adds no information or opinion.

Actual library is at:
http://cyberpython.github.com/AwesomeChartJS/
Sure. They really are super simple. FizzBuzz is simple, but my min bar is a question that no one should miss. Even someone with anxiety should get them right. In theory I could see a good dev getting FizzBuzz wrong or getting flustered. Since I use this as an absolute "no hire" bar it has to be pretty low.

Count the number of occurrances of the letter 'a' in a string. And I'm upfront that this isn't meant to be a trick question having to do with locales or some odd corner of the Unicode world. If there's something funny about the question, let me know, I might learn something, is what I'd tell them.

I'd say 1 in 10 struggle with this question. The other 9 kick it out in 1 minutes. Very little time is lost in the interview.

Another example is to code the nth Fib number with recursion. I give them the recurrence relationship, in case they don't know it, and write some examples. I'm not throwing out Fib and asking for a solution, and secretly ready to pounce and say, "There's a closed form solution!" or what happens on integer overflow or anything. I want them to convert the recurrence relation to code as a recursive function. But I don't mind hearing valid concerns along the way, although really its just a mininmum bar test.

This eliminates about 15% who often don't get it working at all. (I'm really winging these numbers... i should have kept better track of this).

Doing well on these questions means nothing. It just gets you a ticket to the rest of the interview. But not being able to do them is an indication that I don't think I can listen to the rest of what you have to say (for a dev role) and be convinced that you can do the job -- no matter how versed you seem to be with the latest buzzwords.
Spot-on article, especially point #3. I can't imagine how many people have been burned by following his advice on a day to day basis. Haphazard investors turn a blind eye to the disclaimer at the start of the show the same way a gambling addict would to an addiction hotline.

Also, one nitpick grammatical thing to note:

"This gives investors the wrong idea, as it has been showN that the thoughts of Wall Street..."
Yeah, it is. That's what we advocate at Vuru: Responsible Investing. We're all for individual investor empowerment and that's what we like to talk about on our blog.
This article deserves upvoting just for the title alone.
I'd rather like to see pg answer what age demographics comprise YC's start-ups. That data would be awesome (and probably daunting).
FWIW, some people don't understand _interactive fiction_ as being narrowly limited to text adventures:

http://brasslantern.org/beginners/introif.html

Text adventures and other subgenres of interactive fiction do share a lot of common subproblems - creating basic immersion (by storytelling and/or imagery), interaction with the non-living environment, interaction with non-player characters. Different subgenres find their own solutions to each subprobem, often trivializing some parts to improve the treatment of others, but a novel approach to any of these problems can potentially be interesting for multiple or all sub-genres.
Fujifilm starts shipping 5TB magnetic tapes
Cool project but I'd rather not have to sign with Facebook/Twitter. Can you implement an alternative please?
I am not saying you won't be financially able to retire. The money is almost the easy part.
Dropbox!!
Though, unless the documents have links to other documents, their main algorithm (PageRank) isn't going to be very effective.
I forgot to mention that the subject of the conversation was a roadblock that had them totally stuck and I happened to have the right experience. So it wasn't an strategy. They were desperate.
Strange. I'm using Chromium and that button works for me. What's your version?

While I tend to agree, you also have to see, that http://google.com works for almost all users; and adding more options just makes the interface harder.
Agreed. I feel the majority of the science behind this is simply keep things clean and minimal. I would hypothesise 'Get Email Updates' would do better than 'Get Free Email Updates', too.

I don't believe a statistic offers any significant social proof. Lots of faceless people i don't know have signed up. So what?
Is it just me, or are all the charts on the demo page more or less unreadable?

I've used http://www.rgraph.net/ in the past, and it seems significantly more developed than this library.
Listen for complaints to industry problems, think about how you would solve the problem if you had no limits, then narrow that list to realistic possibilities.
Looks promising... I hope others in the community build on this...
Thanks. I'd fix it, but Tumblr is down! :)
Pardon me for getting my news from the Wall Street Journal.
Typo:

Movies are delivered adds free.
I don't think running a protection racket is the best way to get your point across. "I promise never to watch a movie until my demands are met" might actually carry some moral weight.
BlockSite 0.7.1.1

A browser plugin that blocks websites you don't want to visit ever again. (You can put them behind a password making it a nuisance to turn it off)
£1 for the new favicon, £266 for the trouble of dealing with government procurement, £268 to compensate for the guilt of charging the government £267 for £1 of work.
Verizon quietly begins throttling data as iPhone launch looms
There are currently successful services like that. I really don't think that's that big a deal. There are triggers for that sort of thing everywhere; clothes you bought already, other people's babies, etc.
Speaking from a younger persons point of view: what about being 26 would make you worse than say a 21 year old at starting a startup?

If you are supporting other people it may be quite a bit harder but if you are basically only supporting yourself I would see age as an advantage as you have more experience in dealing with problems and more solutions available.

Age to me seems like a silly thing to prevent you from starting a business it is the other things in like that should be taken into consideration.
There are currently successful services like that. I really don't think that's that big of a deal. There are triggers for that sort of thing everywhere; clothes you bought already, other people's babies, etc.
Choose the 66+ option
Mac App Store: Developer godsend or Evil Empire?
From my POV, I waited until I was sure that the designs were what I was going to go forward with (this took about 4-5 weeks, maybe 2-3 iterations of different pages and colors). Then I proposed a % of revenue for x amount of time and it was accepted.

The project has moved slower than if I'd hired a designer (for example Lindsey is currently defending her thesis at school and is 100% focused on that). But I maybe always had the trump card by being like "We need to launch before I have a baby".

Overall I think I got lucky and I'm not sure what advice I'd give. Forrst is like HN for (hungry) designers though.
Ahh... that would be my dyslexia. Will fix it ASAP.
Scary thing is I encountered a similar 'issue':

The quote was to modify a piece of linux-based kit to work with a regular screen and keyboard instead of a touchscreen. The cost? £3300 for 'development'.

I was asked to grab a piece of sample kit and liaise with the development company to have the work done. To cut a long story short, one of the developers called me back a day or so later and gave me instructions on how to change one line in an XML file from TOUCHSCREEN=YES to NO.

After I had completed the work, I reported back to the man in charge of the project and queried the cost. He said that since it was being passed to the customer it was not an issue.
Advocacy groups mobilize for Supreme Court patent showdown
It would be nice, if they could tell their friends about what their grandson did for them, though.
I'm 36, but in internet years, you're two generations ahead of me, so go back to your retirement home, grandpa, and leave this technology stuff to us young'uns.
The dangers of unlicensed engineering