skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Were microsoft, apple, google thinking they had discovered the next ibm, or yahoo when they were working on their idea?

Or were they just working their idea as best they could? creating a revenue stream as quickly as possible and not worrying about trying to be bigger than the previous biggest.

I don't think any of the recent companies, google, twitter, facebook, thought that they had an idea that could create companies bigger than any previous ones. they were nothing but an idea that had potential and something people could understand and use in fun/new/helpful ways. And a team who could deliver that idea.
jtv is similar but is for live video only. also, i plan on adding a lot more interactive features to the site.

Right now all of the users in the room are able to vote for the next video. I hope this clarifies things. Several people have suggested adding a way for the room to collectively decide to "skip video" which is a good idea that I am considering.

Your idea for clicking a bookmarklet and spinning up a video room is good, but it might detract from the main focus of the site now (and there are actually sites that exist that already do this).

Thanks!
I slapped together a crude lexer that works and we’ll just pretend that tokens are raining down from heaven or something.

This perfectly describes all parsing discussions and papers I've read. I love it.
Decent share (10-15 range, pre-dilution). Higher than an employee would usually get, and enough that if the company has a decent exit, I'd cash out well. I don't know how many points he's keeping for himself and how many he's allocated to option pools and other people in the company.

I've no problem with the equity number. My issues are: (1) I don't really have any power, and (2) I'm not having fun anymore, so if we don't make money I'm wasting time. For the first 18 months at this job, I could honestly say that even if we made zero and my deferred back pay never came, it would've been worth my while because I had a lot of fun and learned a lot.
Readability has a LOT of hand tuned heuristics for figuring out the most likely content of the page, but the primary indicator on whether a tag with text in it is part of an article or not is the number of commas in the tag. It's my favorite thing about the algorithm because it's a dumb idea that works. The comma rule gets the extraction correct on about 70% of the web, the rest of the heuristics are mostly there to cover screwy ways people structure their articles.
I put unscatter.com, my open source projects and my blog on my resume to show I play with technology even outside of work.
So basically computing scientists are close-minded rubes? What nonsense.
Age of mother affects child's autism risk
Finding "Hidden" Connections on LinkedIn [pdf]
"Clojure has only been out for three years, but it’s gaining momentum at a rate that we haven’t seen in a new language in decades"

[citation needed]

Unless the context is HN threads with "clojure" in the title.
Blogspam repost of a 2yo+ presentation. A very good one, but still...
Thanks, these are great comments.

1) Yes, this is something I am thinking hard about.

2) Yes, points and gaming like features with player rankings are key here. I would be very happy to hear about more specific thoughts or suggestions.

3) I am not yet thinking too much about monetization, but there are definitely a lot of interesting opportunities. Your idea here is something I will keep in mind!

Thanks!
Having a baby caused me to transition to this style for personal projects. I spend a lot less time in front of the computer now and when I do it's for shorter times.

I've found this approach does give a better result and eliminates false starts. When I'm at the computer now I have already thought through what I'm going to do completely and writing the code is just a minor detail.
Hacker News itself is rather Digg-like and quite focussed.

Reddit is also quite interesting in how it lets you subscribe to reddits that interest you (and unsubscribe from those that don’t), as well as allowing anyone to make a new reddit. It prevents (or delays) the need for site migration, like what happened with the Digg to Reddit exodus, by giving you reddit migration. Don’t like /r/pogramming? Go to /r/coding! Etc.
I think that he means the copy that gets returned is what gets destructively modified.

In other words, the overall process winds up being functional and nondestructive, but the intermediate internal steps aren't necessarily so.
Three years in without success is not terrible, but three years in without even launching is a big red flag. Sounds like even if they do eventually succeed, your boss, er co-founder, will try to marginalize your share/compensation/etc anyway. I'd go.
I know noSQL is all the rage with the crazy kids these days and I know it has its place but why is half of the literature regarding noSQL about solving problems that are trivial in an RDBMS?
I've also played around with combinatorial parsing using F#'s FParsec (a clone of Haskell's Parsec lib) and I found very pleasant and powerful to work with.
Right. You better copy the original data structure. That's one good way to guarantee internal mutation (of the copy) isn't going to be visible. Or it gets tricky (e.g. linear types)
MISS
Why I'm not applying to Y Combinator
Let me get one thing clear. I applied to Y Combinator last year and got rejected - openplatformasaservice.com. I'm ok with that. In fact most of the creators in life I admire were rejected or not understood even their 3rd time out. In fact, most people who make it big, have 6 failures first. I was actually just filling out the 2011 Y Combinator application when I just stopped and said, this is not the right way for me - hence leading to this post. So really, its not sour grapes. When I first found Y Combinator in my angel research, I thought wow, these guys look great! But after applying last year and being rejected and seeing they provide zero feedback after you take a lot of time to present your company, product and vision just the way they want it and rereading their application this year, it dawned on me. This is the same thing as old line VC's but possibly even worse. At least on Sand Hill Road, you would get serious cash and they would have a lot of sweat in the game. Today, we create a prototype or even working model and even have some traction and take less than $20,000 and give up a big piece of our company. Yes the intros are a good perk, but if you truly have something, you will get there regardless. But it is not about the money or percentages. It is the about the entrepreneurial spirit. I wasted precious time trying to make shotgun approach micro-funders who don't believe in any company enough to put real money into it understand something big that would require imagination and balls. Make a video intro, explain yourself, tell us why we should talk to you, bark like a dog. Fuck that. Not anymore. Power to the programmers - right on.
I'm not saying you will write nonsense, I'm asking what evidence you have. The evidence in this case is "I know what I'm doing".
Little big words: How Apple has smartly capitalized on the vowel
You seem to have accidentally traveled back in time to 2011 from whatever golden future you live in before posting this comment.
In a perfect world, people will like the site, and return to it, and maybe spread the word to their friends :)

I also have some ideas for integrating game-like features which would introduce viral elements to the site.

I would love to hear more ideas for getting traffic!
Looks neat, I'll definitely be giving this a try.
Because RDBMS can only scale as far as your most powerful machine. Unless of course you start sharding to several machines, and then you hit the same issues mentioned in this article.
You say....

> So really, its not sour grapes.

Then end with ....

>bark like a dog. Fuck that. Not anymore. Power to the programmers - right on.

You may or may not be rightfully disillusioned, but regardless your attitude is in the gutter.
His sales would be B2B, which is exempt from DNC regulations.
It's amusing that this post about some raft of dependencies that is supposed to make testing easy, painless and fun opens with a mini-rant about an earlier module that was supposed to make things super easy and fun, but ended up causing the author pain.

This seems like a common Rails tradeoff (trading quick development time for dependency chasing and complexity), except it's rarely presented as a tradeoff.
Here is my story about leaving my own and joining a big.

We started it aiming to be a big fish in a tiny pond (software for embedded wireless devices, niche market, yes). But, as an expected result for a project without well-defined goals, we weren't able to build any working software. While we were at it we made money with contract jobs and that reduced time to work on the project furthermore as we were self-funded and it wasn't enough to feed us for more than six months.

To make it worse, one of the founding member, who is a specialist about digital signal processing and we couldn't go without, was considering pursuing academic research.

After plodding through that muddy state for almost five years, I had accumulated enough fatigue and eventually we decided to dissolve it.

Other members had found their own way and I found a job at a big company. Maybe I was fortunate, because it's quite difficult for a thirty-some with somewhat messy job records to find a job at an established company, esp. in Japan. Or maybe not, because my experience and skill set were considered versatile particularly in embedded systems industry.

As others says, I thought of it as bartering freedom with stability. That is partly true, but it wasn't that bad. Among others, it's a definitely invaluable experience to make software of a hardware product that are to be sold in thousand millions. That is what I never do in a small startup.

So mine is one example favoring your move, whatever your motivation is. I believe many big companies think your 3 years at a startup a big plus. Why? Because big companies are full of people without that experience, often only top execs have it, but they sometimes have to start new to survive.

As for maximizing your chances of getting a job at a big co, it is critical to understand and clearly state why you failed. I'm sure they will ask about it if they are decent.
Sign #1: people write 'The Top Ten Signs the Valley is on Tilt Again' articles.
A poor developer uses his tools to cover up the symptoms. A good developer fixes the root cause. The ability of the good developer to fix the root cause quickly and efficiently is bounded by the quality of their tools. If you want to claim that a good developer will find it no matter what, fine, but don't tell me the developer with better tools won't be able to do it faster; it's almost the definition of "better tool". I find it very strange how people just write off using a debugger, ever, for any purpose, and think it labels them as a better developer, as if a carpenter who refuses to use a plane under any circumstances is thus a better carpenter for resisting the temptation to easily-smoothed wood. (The fact that a plane is good for more than that is deliberately part of my point.) It isn't the best solution for every problem and I certainly don't reach for it directly, but when you need it, you need it.
As a condensed matter researcher, agreed. I don't believe that somebody with that level of laboratory equipment (4 probe system, furnace, pellet press etc) can't afford a $150 journal submission fee.

Don't get me wrong - I love DIY science and I don't think a physics journal is the only path to being accepted, but it IS the fastest way to overcome skepticism.
Excellent tidbits!
Yes, "TV internet" and interactive game-like features are two different markets.

I agree that the web provides new possibilities of interaction. But I still think there's a big market for TV-like streaming; a lot of people just want to sit back and watch something they find interesting. And no website on the internet has got it right yet. I can imagine people logging into your website via facebook, and seeing a list of channels that their friends are currently watching.

I'm not saying you shouldn't add any game-like features. I just think they're a distraction from what you already have. After all, content is king when it comes to these sorts of services. I think you should focus on that before game mechanics, since content will be what attracts users the most.

On the other hand, this is just an opinion of some guy on the internet :)
We spent a lot of time over several years tweaking every setting imaginable, trying to get the performance up of a NFS server, none of which really made any difference. Installing SSDs fixed the problem completely. Disk I/O now stays in the single digit percentage range when previously would stay at 100%, sometimes for minutes.

SSDs about twice the price of 15k rpm drives, hardly out of reach for most. Also for VPSs, server axis 20mb unmetered SSDs are cheaper than slicehost's rotating disk based systems. http://serveraxis.com/vps-ssd.php
>You may or may not be rightfully disillusioned, but
> regardless your attitude is in the gutter.
I respect your opinion. However, I would say I WAS disillusioned - but no longer.
the diff is that groupon is a cash machine. digg never was
I love chalkboards, they are the best coding instrument since the abacus, true fact.
They are ok if you do them correctly. First piece of advice would be do not use a dialer. There are very few things business owners hate more than talking to some robot asking them to press 1. Second, cold calling is VERY hard work regardless of how good your product is. You might want to hire a sales professional. If you don't(and I presume you have no phone sales experience) they'll eat you alive. Finally, there are other ways of marketing you may have left out. Have you advertised in trade publications? Or asked for a story in the tech press? Remember that reporters have deadlines to meet and they'll cover almost anything that's interesting. Hope this helps. Good luck on your launch.
I must say it was quite impressive and cool to see my personal's desktop configuration automatically put into a ruby DSL.
Tracking radiation levels in Japan
In practice this isn't true. As it turns out, the browsers that don't support overflow-y (certain versions of IE) happen to display a vertical scrollbar by default anyway.

Adding 'min-height: 100%' to the body will actually add a few pixels of empty space which the user can scroll to (confusing and ugly); whereas "html { overflow-y: scroll; }" will insert a placeholder for the scrollbar, the scrollbar itself will be grayed out. This is much better behavior in my opinion.

Also "html { overflow-y: scroll; }" is self-describing (i.e. the real goal is to add a vertical scrollbar to the html, not make the minimum height of the body 101%).
Can't help but feel that with that attitude YC were right not to accept you - sorry.
Same here... Just a week ago, I spent the whole night looking at code trying to find out how some mysterious data loss had occurred. Needless to say, I had been to bed half an hour before it hit me what had happened. I instantly got up and fetched my laptop to confirm that was indeed the case.

I think you are right, about letting go of all assumptions, and that helps you find the edge cases.
> Is there something at core of php that makes this inevitable?

Yeah, the fact that there is no way to separate code and content. In my past days as a PHP dev, I've done this and similar things many, many times (also putting a space at the beginning or end, and having random other stuff fail because something can't set a header anymore).

It has always appeared obvious to me that PHP should define a "pure code" file, one in which "<?php" would be illegal syntax, and which would never have its content written to the client. That's how nearly all PHP is written, anyway, and it would eliminate a good deal of stupid errors.
This particular article is addressing problems that would not be trivial in an RDBMS. If you're worried about concurrency when incrementing a counter, you're at a level of scale few people get to work on.

There's a legitimate rant to be had about using elephant architecture to serve mouse traffic, and I think that's what annoys me most about the NoSQL fad. But that doesn't mean the problems mentioned in this article don't exist.
Yes. On a typical day there's a new 50% discount on ebook and ebook+print, of up to 3 different but related titles. On Christmas, there was 50% on all purchases. Then a couple days later was $15 off on all.

As with many commodities, you can simply pass until the price is sufficiently low. Unless you really want the thing immediately.
4 & 5 go with my number 1 advice which is to use what works from IRC.

I agree with 6 as long as it is just chat, if he provides more community features outside of just the chat areas, it could be considered more social.
I've been playing around in robotics for 25 years, and one of the things that is just as true today as it was in 1985 is that for some mechanical parts, motors, gears, and other linkages, there isn't any 'there' there. And so the ability to manufacture small lots of things is appealing on a variety of scales. That being said, I suspect this particular effort, like those before it, won't come to fruition. The reason is that manufacturing, while easy to comprehend, is insanely complex at the nuts and bolts level.

That being said I would love to see this be successful, I've got a simple idea for a widget and if I could get some time in a factory to make a few thousand of the structural bits to keep the costs down, I think I'd have a nice little niche product. While I'm sure I could get it done in China, I'm not interested in spending the time to learn the way to correctly bribe the necessary people to get the product I want.

Another risk of this capability is weapons production. Making guns is actually pretty easy (the California prison population displays great creativity in this area). So if you create a capability to make small quantities of 'hard metal' products I would expect that you would be visited often by folks who would want to insure you're not tempted to become profitable the 'easy' way.

I hope it works though, it would be great to have a field of small factories bloom.
Excited to see how this is integrated with Magpie
I'm sorry you feel that way. I was re-reading information on systems architecture and came across the article. I thought it was relevant to HN and thought hey this is something people might like to read. Not everyone here has been here since 09 and not everyone here will have seen the article. Just trying to help educate fellow members of this community.
They'd also have to alleviate the UX problems with Flash - most notably the fact that it's a development tool for mouse-based UIs, not multitouch UIs.

It's notoriously difficult to design for an environment in which you don't know whether the user can mouseover or not, whether they can use multitouch gestures or not, whether there needs to be scrollbars vs. draggable content, and you don't even know if the pointing device will be a pixel-accurate mouse pointer or an inaccurate finger.
> The Japanese have a cultural fascination with humanoid robots.

If you are talking about pop culture, yes. However, non-humanoids don't make news as they have already been part of Japanese culture. Even kids know cars, toys, foods etc are made by robots.

As Estragon pointed out, Japan doesn't have robots suitable for such condition as it didn't have urgent necessity.

In addition, the Fukushima power plants are very old and I think it was not designed for inspection and repair by robots.
Creative wedding fotos
I think you are on the right track of where I am getting... Before running through all the code, x = .9999999, but at the end of all the operations, x = 1, so; if placed in a "for loop", with a condition outside of the loop, its possible that the compiler would return "false" for x = x.
It is a beautiful answer by Feynman
If you weren't passionate. You probably wouldn't be an entrepreneur.
U.S. Missiles Strike Libyan Air-Defense Targets
I like this very much, and I would love to see markdown or some other rich markup for chatting.
I'm glad reddit went with a subreddit system. You see local moderators and some passionate communities about their own domains.
I had a great "attitude" when I applied and jumped through all the hoops last year so I fail to see your point. Unless you are saying the Y Combinator folks are psychic? If that were the case, they would pick winners every time, yes? But seriously, I wouldn't call it an "attitude." I would call it an informed opinion - your opinion may differ.
This is democracy, cool!
> If they interviewed one of the scientists whose name was on the paper, wouldn't that count?

No.

If you're reporting on science, for example, the interview is unlikely to provide sufficient information. The interview is information for telling a story. Why? Because journalists aren't subject-matter-experts - they're story-tellers.

> Finally, I think you missed his point- not all news organizations are going the tabloid route.

You miss the point. The fact that some news organizations don't trade coverage for access does not imply that those organizations are producing good news. It just means that they're not committing a specific (albeit common) sin.

In other news "both sides don't like my coverage" does not imply "my coverage is good/fair/balanced/etc".

However, it would be nice if you provided a link to all of the interview, not just the results of your edit.
I don't read Dutch so can't be sure, but I suspect the headline is wrong. It should have been "WiFi Hacking Does Not Violate One Particular Law". There could be other Dutch laws that it would violate.
There's still an argument to be made that it's largely esoteric even for programmers. There's an enormously large cross section of professional programmers for whom this is really only relevant to satisfy some curiosity rather than in any way relevant to their day to day coding. There's 100% no use in knowing the difference between an L1 and L2 cache hit compared to a branch misprediction if your day job involves, say, writing Wordpress plugins in php or iOS apps or maintaining some corporate Java app.
Symmetrical portraits: Julian Wolkenstein
Except the problem with that mentality is that you now have to start charging more (as car companies do for their high-end models). How much money could Id Software or Epic games make for a title that requires a $2000 PC to play? How many copies could they sell? Would the support nightmare be worth it? Think Ferrari/Porsche money compared to Honda/Toyota money. What do you "drive"?

That being said - I would like to see someone try this, and I would probably buy said game (unless it was another stupid CoD clone).
The debugger vs no debugger "problem" has been discussed through and through countless times with little result. I don't think we'll reach new insight this time. People just work differently.
It's a Blue Honda problem -- or whatever the name was. You buy a new car, suddenly you see them everywhere. A type of selection bias. You probably don't see it because you aren't tuned into it.
Show HN: Made this today, RankMyPlaylist.com
I think its completely fine to have quizzes as part of the process but asking people to spend several hours on one before they´ve even talked to the company is a bit much IMO.
Chart: The Human Costs of Different Types of Energy
Yep (linked to from the TC comments).