skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whenever I start a project in the internet/web app field, the first thing is to come up with a great idea and get excited about it.

Then do nothing.

The next step? Check thoroughly to see if it was done already.
In economics the reverse hockey stick growth is known as diminishing marginal returns. This simply means the market values the earliest years of experience as much more beneficial to a developers skill than the later.

I wonder which part of the market it is that champions valuing developers this way; is it the companies that value that additional experience less, or is it the developers who diminish the additional value more experience adds? They both ultimately agree, as but I wonder which side is making the harder compromise here to get to that agreement.

I can't help but see this graph, though, and get the impression that after a certain number of years, people just stop caring so much. It might be that they grow apathetic. It might also be that the asymptote is the level at which salary stops mattering, and people focus on other things. I'd kind of believe that; you can been pretty comfortable most places at $100-120k/yr, and might start worrying more about things that go beyond mere comfort.
> So, you want a realistic, down-to-earth show... that's completely off-the-wall and swarming with magic robots?

That actually sounds like the first few seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I would have given any of several other examples, but you specified that there must be "magic robots", which narrows things down a lot.

The kids' desires aren't actually contradictory, if you've got the writing skills to pull it off.
Good point dude. We didn't just pick the "most startupy" person as our roommate. We had a number of factors that we considered (and took notes on in a spreadsheet) that helped us figure out if we'd be compatible.
And the fact that the writers stretched the truth so the story would be somewhat fresh

Actually I'd argue that they changed the story to make it less fresh, but more understandable/appealing to the non-tech audience. After all, who doesn't understand jilted love as a motivator? Whereas the "hacker's ethic" -- try something to see it it'll work -- is tougher to convey to a general audience.

(For the record, I thought it was still a great movie.)
i am much more interested in the new Macbook Pro that are rumored to be announced on Thursday. With an event a week later that now seems unlikely though.
"In short - there is no new functionality as we have mentioned previously beyond client-side support for RemoteFX and Dymanic Memory which are 2 new virtualization features enabled in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1."

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive...

Summary: SP1 is just a collection of hotfixes:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17855015/Hotfixes%20and%20Security%2...
> True Grit is a remake

So was the 1939 Wizard of Oz.

> Inception isn't ever going to be a classic a la The Matrix.

And you know this because...
You’re entirely correct, except for this: The pie chart applies here because the author made no attempt to correlate number of profane commits with number of commits, total, per language. This post means literally nothing, so he could use whatever graph he damn well felt like.

This is not HN worthy.
>1-3 on the front-page display for http://remote-jobs.com/jobs/32_NLP___ML___Python_contractor

1-3 what? Hours per day? Years? Months? Fortnights? Somewhere / somehow, you should inform what unit you're using. Add it on the end, or maybe a mouse-over. Or, if there were enough listings to make it clear (ie, a 4-5h/day entry), it'd be fine-ish the way it is.

Similarly, I notice that the Mobile Developer falls into a second line - trim it, inform it's been trimmed (...), and a mouse-over would be useful.

All in all, looks quite nice, and fast to use from a consumer standpoint. I'll have to keep an eye on it!
It seems like they did not make a single document that contains everything. The information about SP1 is split up into four separate docs:

1. Hotfixes and Security Updates included in Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 Service Pack 1

2. Notable Changes in Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2

3. Deployment Guide for Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1 and Windows 7 with SP1

4. Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Beta Test Focus Guide

Depending on which type of information you are looking for you'd need to get the corresponding one. Note the list of hot fixes is an xls spreadsheet.
I dare you to click the release notes link on that page.
This is exactly how I feel over the past couple of years, and each time I convinced myself that it's better to have competitors.. because it makes sense, right? (potential users, their needs, etc.)

But somehow this feeling that other people also came up with that cool idea ("my idea", "the idea") took all my passion about the project away.

My biggest disappointment was when I see flavours.me while I was coding exactly the same. I was thinking to make the website involved with information retrieval/recommendation though, but the interface was going to be exactly the same. At that time, I even started a master's program with an emphasis on machine learning in order to code this project better and my thesis advisor was an author of one of the machine learning books that's being recommended at hackerbooks.com and probably one of the best academic I can study on machine learning). Everything was going perfect --until a friend of mine told me about flavours.me... and all my passion just went away because I was exactly looking at the project that I was gonna implement -even the backend was going to be much more different.

But then, when about.me got acquired by AOL, I disappointed much more because they did the same project with flavours.me and they got successful.. Now, I can realize that it's not about the unique idea. It's about to fill tiny gaps, and keep trying until you bet your competitors. And a couple of months ago, I started my project again and I think it's gonna be awesome.

But still, I think it discourages to see an implemented copy of your idea before getting started to work on it. Maybe it's better to come up with a quick (but not that dirty) implementation of the project, and then looking for competitors (and hopefully, to see you are doing better) and then improving your idea.
but they do have more satisfying sex lives.
This is a substantial game-changer in this market. The sub-$15 merchants should use Square over a merchant account. My guess is that square is looking to build critical mass but is losing money at the lower end of the spectrum (quick math says on transactions below $6.83), unless they have managed to negotiate a deal with MC/Visa (unlikely).
San Jose shows the world how to play serious Innovation Games
Thanks seji. Looks like we're in the clear. We didn't say the person had to be anything, but we did pick based on certain qualities / characteristics.

"in a situation in which a landlord owns less than four rental units, and lives in one of the units, it is legal for the owner to discriminate in the selection process based on the aforementioned categories, but it is illegal for that owner to advertise or otherwise make a statement expressing that discriminatory preference."
Hi Daniel, I did not intend to make into a 'battle'. The site is just a hobby for me as well, I have no delusions about getting bought out by Amazon or spinning this into a huge thing. My goal, in fact, was to make enough money each month that I could buy a new book :)

The enemies reference fit in nicely with Getting Real -- which I recently finished reading and was what pushed me to build the site -- but I hope that it didn't come off as being overly aggressive/hostile.

Thank you for the advice, I will take it to heart.
The only PHP devs using git are all super professional with the patience of saints?
PHP is a fine language once you understand the warts and accept the few that exist. While it's not everyone's cup of tea, what it does, it does well. Far too many people program PHP for a couple years (or not even) and proclaim it's a horrid language. Ruby is the it language, and Python is close behind. These are the Pop languages of the day. But PHP developers who are still using the language know it. They know it really well. And just consider how long PHP has been around and been popular?

I think a lot of people that would whine and complain about PHP aren't doing so on gh. Instead, they are using python, rails, or other languages. The ones using PHP, however, know it, and probably aren't swearing because they are probably just writing good software.
Also, people become far more risk-averse as their careers progress. This is particularly true in high-paying jobs like software development; its hard to walk away from $100k+ job to start your own project, especially with a wife and kids depending on you. The younger you are the more risks you can take.

Also, as you said, software evolves quickly. So its completely reasonable for a 25 year old to have mastery of a new and exploitable technology... makes for an interesting entrepreneurial dynamic.
"But you cannot produce particle using just energy."

Yes you can.

And no I don't agree with your last sentence.
I chose these movies not necessarily because I felt they were superb (although I loved them all) but because they were critically acclaimed and all received lots of oscar nominations. Almost by definition, they are the best films of the year.

If you compare it to nominated movies ten years ago, Braveheart, Apollo 13, I think they are comparably great.

Additionally, box office returns seem to be at all time highs. Black Swan and True Grit are two films that typically would be destined for "niche" audiences, but have returned hundreds of millions for reasonably small budgets.

Also, I think that Inception will be almost as influential as The Matrix, except in a smaller genre of films (eg: Matrix built upon action movies, whereas Inception was more of a psych thriller) - in my opinion.
Annotator: the copy-editor of the web
Unaffected for now.
Thanks Al. I wouldn't say it's impossible to burn out - but youth and passion and lack of spouse/children help.
I believe it will be available in March or April. My evidence? The Apple store is now selling "refurbished" iPads at pretty decent discounts. This almost always happens right before they update a product:

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals/ipad

It's not scientific, but Apple generally tries to clear inventory of the current model by selling brand new units as "refurbished" through their online store a week or two in advance.

By the way, this method of predicting when an Apple product is about to be updated has never steered me wrong in the past.
Ask HN: How does an early stage startup measure productivity of employees?
Number of code commits, lines of code might be one measure. Putting in lots of hours might be another. Responsiveness to completing minor tasks vs. big/fun stuff another.

Lean startups measure the progess of the product through customer validation. Maybe then, by proxy, success of the product is the only measure of employee productivity that matters, one could suppose. But is there a more direct way to measure employee productivity?

(This may be a managerial question, but also a way for technical employees to reflect on how they spend their time.)
Wow, lowendbox is a fantastic resource! I've been looking for a cheap UK VPN endpoint for years, and lowendbox has plenty of options. Thanks for the link.
Thank´s everyone for taking the time to read, post and spread!

I´m surprised how helpful you have been and how much attention this post generated. HN is truly a force to be reckoned with and I salute you all.
Cross posted on Quora:
http://www.quora.com/How-does-an-early-stage-startup-measure...
> I don't think polarization is a good signal for poor quality;

I think they just mean that polarizing may be explained by the re-use of old materials. Re-use = bad movies.
My opinions are known on occasion to be wrong, but ...

You've been given several items of good advice here, none of which is easy, all of which are (as far as I can see) right.

You need to create a "presence" on the web. You need a portfolio of work, writing and comments. You haven't submitted to HN often, but many, many of your submissions have got excellent upvotes. Your comments score less well, showing that you're not adding as much value through them, but that's not surprising.

Work on writing well.

But more importantly, contribute to projects.

Become known.

Then you're not simply a programmer from a country that supplies cheap programming. You're an individual, and you can take on specific tasks, not as an out-sourcer, but as a remote-working contractor.
The AC0 Prime Number Conjecture
here's the medicare fee schedules. You need to map codes to costs and locations, but it's doable.

http://www.cms.gov/FeeScheduleGenInfo/
That's strange, because I've found the opposite to be true.
Enjoys similar food and drink. Good.
Washes dishes when the sink is full. Good.
Uses headphones after 11:00. Good.
Cleans bathroom when it's his turn. Good.
Pays bills on time. Very good.
Doesn't use semicolons at the end of the line. Reject.
My question is how does he leave that app running while he drives around. When I turn on GPS on my HTC incredible the battery dies in 1.5 hours.

Otherwise I'd love to record everywhere I go like this. I'm hoping the next generation of phones won't have this problem.
Fair enough - I agree that certain things should be left to professionals.

But I would also hope that professionals are contacted before such laws are passed.
tptacek hit the nail on the head: find something somewhere else.

hn-books is extremely powerful: as a laboratory to tell me how to do other sites. As a book site it isn't hitting on so much (as much as I am growing to like it) If you were to find another market where there aren't 40 thousand guys writing code? Something like that might have a LOT more traction. (wink, wink, nudge, nudge)
I don't like the statement that "Hacker News ruined my morning." That seems like you're either creating a link-bait headline trying to appeal to the emotions of HNers or you're trying to shift responsibility from yourself to another entity.

I really don't think that you're trying to do either; it seems to me you just wanted to vent and share your thoughts. Though, you may want to consider how your headline may read to your intended audience. I typically don't respond well to these types.

Use the fact that competition exists as validation for a market. I wish you the best of success.
Ouch. That's a pretty damning list Matt compiled.
Convore vs Banterly - Beaten to the punch
I'm surprised there are so few commit messages with curse words in them. 210 out of 929857, thats like 0.02%, I would have thought that developers were more vulgar then that(I know I am).

Maybe if we looks at comments in source code we would get a better representation of the vulgarness of developers.
> Note that I ripped an equal amount of commit messages per language so the results aren't based on how many projects there are per language.

All the languages are equally represented by commit count.
I have a much different suggestion that most. Connect with a local group that is already doing work for a start up or major company. Building relationships is far more valuable in my mind then anything else you can do. While having a killer portfolio is good, just like resumes often times porfolios are not as authentic as one would have you believe. Quality relationships that can give you referrals or references are by far the most valuable thing you can develop.

I worked for a large company here in the states that outsourced all of their development to India, we had about 100 full time developers on staff. That team no longer exists however whenever I need to outsource I go to the relationships I established from that team to either contract directly with them or get recommendations from them.

It might not be what you want in the short term, however it is a great way to make connections and reduce the barrier to entry for you.

In my mind the barrier to entry for most startups is time and to a certain extent money. I know I cannot afford to take flyers on developers who I don't have confidence will deliver for me on time and on budget and what is worse if someone fails to deliver not only am I late but I am also out anything I may have paid for the work.

I hope this advice assists you in some way.
Your point holds true for all languages in the graph.
Show HN: 4square & 7 years ago: What were you doing a year ago?
Cindy Alvarez Teaches How To Get Useful Feedback
Really? All I can find[1] seems to indicate all parties need to consent:

"4. The term 'interception' means to secretly hear, secretly record, or aid another to secretly hear or secretly record the contents of any wire or oral communication through the use of any intercepting device by any person other than a person given prior authority by all parties to such communication..."

[1] http://www.malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartIV/TitleI/...
Hm, besides the project being dead, what is the advantage of an incomplete Lisp to C# compiler over Clojure on the CLR?
I think it's fair to say that the Toy Story movies (and possibly Pixar movies in general) is an exception to the Polarizing Sequels trend, similar to the Batman franchise. I'd be curious to see a filter that lets you select films by studio and/or distributor.
If that's what the typical business person thinks, they're wrong. It's not about taking fractional shares of existing markets; it's about finding defensible niches. Fractional market shares have a way of going to zero if your product is just a me-too.
A couple of friends and I created an app during the foursquare hack day that sends you an email of what you were doing a year ago.

A nice little hack to remind you where you were. Part nostalgic, part discovery (blackout nights), totally awesome :)

Enjoy!
And colour television is worse than black-and-white, too.
The appropriate measure is not whether bad movies are made; (or popular) it's whether good films are still produced. There is some room for concern - mid-budget films for adults like, for example, 'Master and Commander' are essentially dead. The economics of film push studios to make blockbusters or low-budget films. Still, there are enough good low-budget films still being produced that I won't give in to despair just yet.
Yeah, any viable list of swear words has to include "damn" (and derivatives), "hell", and "ass" (and derivatives). I'd even go so far as to say that "crap" and "retard" (and derivatives) are sufficiently unprofessional that they belong on the list.
Go work in industry: you'll find plenty of products or pieces of infrastructure that have been developed solely because a) there was no money for the best solution, b) best solution was open source and we can't use it (think finance, insurance, etc.) or c) someone thought they could do a better job.
But I agree, it's very discouraging to work on something that isn't the first or you know there are very many of. First year in college, the first full-time group project we had was done by all the 200 other CS students at the college, in groups of 5. That's 20-30 groups all developing the same software according to the same 40 page requirements package. Oh, and they used the same project for 3-4 years. That's 120 solutions to the same essential problem and is very demotivating, even for students.
Tax will always bump up the price, unless you're a grocery store.
Making sense of large corpus of text via machine learning, say .. SVM which stands on top of linear algebra (computing inner products in an isomorphic space of bigger dimension via kernel functions) (Hillary Mason working at bit.ly gives talks about this stuff http://www.hilarymason.com/ )

Data mining, a lot of which boils down to multidimensional exploratory statistics needs linear algebra.
That's the most intellectual point anybody has made in this anti-php thread.
If there was an iPhone available for every carrier and it cost $20, then nobody would be using Android except the hard-core Linux hackers (like myself).

That might well be true, but it ignores the reality of the facts that there isn't an iPhone available for every carrier for $20, and that Android devices are presently outselling it.

Cheap crap = sales, but you don't get to pretend that those sales don't count just because they involve cheap crap.
True.

Though, I wonder why Ruby programmers are immature and careless?

Stereotyping is fun!
I am all for any effort Apple and others make to improve the quality of music downloads, but do enough people care to make this worth the effort commercially?

It seems like some ridiculous number (90%? 99%?) of listener/equipment combinations would get almost no benefit from this change.

What am I missing?
Amazing where this generation is going. When I was 8 my cake was about the Count from Sesame Street
The ziplist/zipmap optimization is excellent too. I took some sample data in Redis 2.0 and 2.2 and saw that Redis 2.2 used 1/5th the memory. Though, I was storing just lists of integers. See http://redis.io/topics/memory-optimization for more.
It probably hasn't helped that TV can now feature long-running complex shows (Lost, the Sopranos, the Wire, Dexter, Mad Men, the Office, etc) that 2 hour movies can't beat in terms of character exploration and plot depth.
A Git Guide to Dating
Or F#? Has no-one written something for Lisp-ish that talks F#?
How is swearing more meaningful than not swearing in a commit message? Perhaps some developers don't like the idea of the entire world seeing them swear at - basically - text.
Just be careful with anything that looks "too good to be true", unless you are not going to be adversely effected if the provider disappears suddenly (eg you are proxying rather than web serving). Don't pay for a year upfront unless we're talking <$10

A lot of these 'companies' are literally run by 15 year olds - which is fine (I used to run a web host way back in the day when I was 16), but don't expect A1 business practices.

Frankly, you can't beat a $19/month Linode out of their London datacenter.
This is a common claim, but I've never seen any evidence other than "Hollywood does it this way so it must be better" (which ignores the effect of path dependence). I have, however, read about James Cameron advocating 48 Hz...

This rant also ignores the realities of the consumer electronics business. In many cases, the optimal thing for a TV to do is take the pixels coming from HDMI and display them as-is with no processing, but this minimizes differences between brands and eliminates upsell opportunities for higher-end models. Even if they know they're making the image worse, their jobs depend on it.
i'd like to see this same comparison, except comparing different version control systems
Pittsburgh is the most liveable city in the U.S.
"You can execute perfectly and still fail completely."

Love it!
I think this is only a problem if you're targeting niches because as I see it, if you can't use your own product while pretending to be your non-technical mother, then you shouldn't be in business unless you're selling for a premium. Unfortunately, technical geeks won't pay a premium and they themselves can often build something relatively useful with, in this case, even a simple google search:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

I actually went through this exercise before and found it to be annoying, but how often do you search for and buy books? It's not everyday you do.

Don't get me wrong, I've bookmarked your site and find it useful, but I probably won't go back to it in a while.
You're claiming it wasn't "predictable", it was indeed predictable. Perhaps not on "main street", but the perpetrators(large chunk of wall street) knew what they were doing and didn't speak up about it because they were too busy profiting from it.
V.L. Inozemtsev: Neo-Feudalism Explained
I think once tablets have HDMI out I become very interested.
I ran it on an HTPC for about a month before I bought the Boxee Box.