skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Part of the reason this one isn't more widely known is certainly because there's already a lot of good tutorials. (And even more bad ones).

For every article like this one, there's quite a few people posting "here's another awesome tutorial!" -- and yes, guilty as charged.

Also, this is much closer to a textbook in scope & depth, which (a) turns a lot of people away, despite being a fantastic resource and (b) makes it less blog-able.
I suppose it's interesting to think about how Mr Wilson built his community, but more important is the sort of community he's managed to build and the question of whether it's a good or bad community. A community isn't an end in itself, and as someone recently pointed out, one of the great things about the internet is that it allows people to escape the communities they physically live in. (Think about the gay Midwestern kid in the wheelchair from Milk for a moment.)

If words like "good" and "bad" aren't to your liking, please substitute productive/unproductive, useful/useless, interesting/boring, liberating/stifling, or whatever arbitrary dichotomy you prefer.

As for the AVC community, I don't find it particularly interesting. It attracts a lot of fanboys, especially Android fans who consider anyone who buys an iPhone to be sheeple brainwashed by the Steve Jobs reality distortion field. And it attracts a lot of people who are basically promoting themselves or their businesses, and they're trying really hard to exude gravitas. Fuck gravitas.

Community is not an end in itself. A community is just as likely to embody dynamics that enforce a soul-crushing conformity as it is likely to be nurturing and supportive. All communities are mixed bags—I think that's inevitable, but don't hold me to it—and the processes that create a community are going to shape the community and the way its members interact, so I would suggest looking at AVC and asking yourself whether you want to create an AVC like community before you decide to consciously harness, deploy, or whatever those processes to create a community.

Oh, and the idea that you can replicate anything involving a group of people using a recipe-like approach is ridiculous. Life's complicated.
NY Tech meetup is the biggest: http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech

NY Founder Dating: http://www.meetup.com/new-york-founder-dating

NY Hacker News: http://www.meetup.com/NYHackerNews

There are many many more.. It's very easy to get caught up in going to meetups in NYC. Don't let them become too much of a distraction.
List Comprehensions in C
You know there is a saying in the creative industry when project managers come knocking on your door.

"You want it know, or when it's done?"

My personal experience is that most deadlines are primarily perceptual.
The Technium: From Mass to Mesh
The open source SparkleShare gives users the same feel of Dropbox, while using Git as its backing storage:

http://www.sparkleshare.org/

It currently has native clients for Linux and Mac, with Windows coming soon.
when closing out the item they'd also fill in how long it actually took

Excellent idea. We do this and it really works well to see how far off your estimates were. Feedback is essential to controlling any process!
I wonder at what point Apple is going to have to start building these kinds of technologies. Purchasing Siri was supposed to be a step in that direction but nothing has come of it yet.

I worry that it's not in Apple's DNA to build products they can't directly charge for. Apple doesn't do freemium. The hope would be that third parties would pick up the slack.

However I'm not sure that startups can match Google in bigdata. So how will Apple catch up in voice recognition? In mapping (which also uses Android data to improve things like traffic and rerouting)?
Just sad.

I currently move over to IL and would've loved to see their ranking. Everyone over here is fast to tell me that you can cope without hebrew easily, my anecdotal evidence is far different.

This dataset could've been an unbiased source of information.
This was not the goal. Recall that they tried to buy Yahoo and merge into a solid competitor agains Google. I'm sure there are many smart people still left at MS, but not as many as you make it sound.
Founder Conference is not for Entrepreneurs, says Google
> Every generation is rebellious in youth, and conservative in age

That's a common thing to say, but it only touches upon appearances. What does the older generation have to rebel against if it is already its own source of authority? On the other hand, as soon as the 14-year olds develop their own source of authority separate from that of their parents, teachers, etc., they are labeled as unstable psychotic teens and measures are taken to make them conform.

Being a Nietzschian, I am strongly of an opinion that, "once a rebel, always a rebel," and it may well be that the baby-boomer generation will have set the mark for generational rebellion that will not be surpassed by their children or grand children.
Although bconway is trying to look out for your better interests, I'm going to advise you to go with the route you just mapped out.

Maybe your idea isn't the "one". Maybe you can't pull off running a startup. Maybe you aren't in the right place at the time.

But I'm betting that the preceding paragraph is all false. And even if I'm wrong, at least you put your balls on the line and did something you believed in. The story of your startup will beat an infinite number of drunken frat stories any day.

Safety Net: You can always head back to college if things get ugly.
As contrived as it sounds, I've found that my desire to make more money has been as a score keeper. Something that drives my competitive edge.

The same reason I like looking at traffic stats, and income stats. More traffic, more money -> winning more. It's just a form or manifestation of internal motivation.

I make plenty of money now, but I still have a desperate need to grow/expand.
Startup Quote: Marco Arment, founder, Instapaper
http://www.pvpower.com. PVPower's flagship product, SolarBear is a marketplace that brings together the products, process, customers and capital needed for widespread adoption of residential solar power.

Founded in 2009, raised a seed round in 2009, raising an A round right now, closing in May.

CEO - Dan Kuthy
COO - Nick Yecke
UML is a description of the engine. It doesn't answer: "do we need our own transportation device instead of taking a taxi?"
I've thought about this before as well, particularly when I've administered or moderated various forums (frequently related to MMORPGs, which might skew the sample).

Scoring of threads/posts seems like a fairly intuitive solution to the designer. But users / members frequently have a different agenda, which means that the tools won't always work as intended depending on the community.

"Conversation by community" also seems like a feature, not a bug, from where I sit. If enough different people self-organize into nano-parties (in a political sense), then you've really fostered something interesting and useful, or at least potentially so.
Matasano. 2005. South loop.
> What mattered was to get the idea out and to start the conversation, editing and polish would follow later.

On the other hand, careless writing shows that the author places little value on his thoughts, for if he thought them important he would spend a little more time on their delivery, ensuring the contents don't get destroyed in the process.
Its pretty simple to command 80-100k job in the DC area just working for government contractors. 4 years experience and solid dev skills of the major languages will fetch 95k a year in DC.
Although the book focuses on the business end of technology and is heavy on jargon, there are some interesting topics in this short book review that I think HN would find interesting.

* One trend is “tryvertising,” where, instead of advertising, companies place products in people’s daily lives. In some cases, people pay a small fee to get samples of new products, and then give feedback to the manufacturer. For only five euros, a Barcelona-based outfit, esloúltimo, allows customers to try out five products for two weeks, including a variety of food, household, and tech products. Tryvertising might be used to listen to a potential market and hone the offer, or simply to determine the market’s preference for owning, as opposed to just using, new tools and services.

* Zipcar is a near perfect example of a successful Mesh business. It doesn’t make, sell, or repair cars. It shares them. Zipcar is primarily an information business that happens to share cars.

* There are seven keys to building trust in the Mesh: 1. Say what you do—manage expectations and revisit them frequently. 2. Use trials. 3. Do what you say. 4. Perpetually delight customers. 5. Embrace social networks and go deep. 6. Value transparency, but protect privacy.
People will pay for something they like because they want to ensure its future.

- Marco Arment (@marcoarment)

http://startupquote.com/post/4441756277
This is EXACTLY what I'm doing and it seems to be working out great. Finding exercise for the higher level topics is a bit more challenging, but there is a lot out there. The thinkstats book is great if you're a programmer:

http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkstats/html/index.html

I've also been studying a berkely stats course on itunes u and working the exams/notes from this class:

https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/fenghong/www/STAT100/

I'm also reading a lot about financial analysis and risk assessment to fiddle around with real-world applications of the things I'm learning.

it's a hell of a journey.
When less is more - iMovie on the iPad 2 makes video editing fun again
Thanks for the feedback. I was surprised a bit by the interior design concept being a top candidate. Granted, small sample size, but interesting all the same.

Here's some pros to that idea:

- I've definitely have felt the need as my wife and I searched for some interior design advice in the past, even calling a local designer (who never returned our phone call.)

- being able to discuss and bounce ideas around with my wife could be nice as well

- would be interesting to get feedback from designers as well as prospective clients

I have no idea the market size, and I'm still unclear as to the best means of designing a room online, but putting together some wireframes or landing pages seems like a great way to start.

Thanks to everyone for feedback thus far!
My primary phone is a N900, a Maemo phone. I have also used a Nexus S and a Xoom, primarily for development.

There are a lot of things that I really like about Maemo over Android; here's some off the top of my head:

1. It's much more hackable. It's really a lot like have a miniature Linux system. There's no need to do any special firmware updates to get root access, and it's relatively simple to replace any system component.

2. It has better IPv6 support, albeit with a non-stock kernel.

3. System-level support for proxies—I find it hard to believe Android does not do this.

4. A real keyboard

5. Better SSH/OpenVPN support

There are some things that are nicer on Android, such as Google Maps for navigation. The on-screen keyboard for the Xoom is not too bad to use.
Absolutely correct.

For the record though, that offer is for a government position, not contracted.
For anyone interested, I just put together a link round up of some of the most interesting posts/articles of the CEO change starting from January till now.

http://www.jasonshen.com/2011/how-larry-page-returning-to-ce...
Launched http://www.BeyondThePedway.com 2 years ago to cover the creative companies in Chicago, and later pivoted to focus on creative entrepreneurs here in Chicago as well as all over.

Launching a community for parent entrepreneurs called http://www.NaptimeEntrepreneurs.com at the beginning of May.
But from your manager's perspective, you probably do know. You know if it will take more than or less than a year. You know if it will take more than or less than a month. You have some idea of what needs to be done. You have some idea of what parts of it you don't know, etc.

One of the most important things I've learned about estimating is first asking how accurate an estimate is needed. Often the person just wants to know "can I have it tomorrow, or will it take 3 months?"
How much is it growing by per day? That's more important than the total volume of data.

The strategies for these situations are very different:

- 500TB growing by 1GB per day
- 500TB growing by 1TB per day

In the first case, it's mostly about preservation, and optical media is a very real possibility.

In the second case, unless you have a source of cheap labor near your data center, optical media isn't probably an option.
It's a shame they're just static images, the sound effects that go along with the GUIs are the thing I get the biggest kick out of!
Yes, it's absolutely still true, although certainly to a lesser degree than a few years ago. The obvious easy example is games. The number of AAA games available on OSX is still tiny compared to what's available on Windows.
This is a really good move for Google and might make them more relevant again. For the last few years they've had a real problem executing on anything fundamentally new.
There are guis for git. And in my experience teaching someone (in customer service) how to check in and check out files in an SCM takes about 20 minutes.
I've been looking for someone to work with on my social networking project, so give a shout if you would like to discuss it. Would be nice to reapply (or get funding elsewhere) with a strong team.
I left a comment already on the post, but negative feedback is bound to happen, the best part is that you can update and iterate based on the feedback since you got it out there so quickly.

Don't be embarrassed. ;)
It's hard to comment without seeing your work, is your product public? Do you have a url?
Thanks!

My brother plans on using it for DJing with Traktor.

The ideas is that you never ever need to touch a laptop while DJing. I would love to extend it to use an android phone as a display (so that the laptop can be hidden away under the table or whatever).

At the moment, we have 4 banks which change the MIDI channel of everything else, and 4 banks for the 16 midifighter buttons. These four banks basically map to each one of four Traktor decks. The 4 "global" banks are then used to choose between browsing through songs, loops, various deck control commands and effects.

I imagine mashing up breakbeats with those buttons would be really compulsive :)

Its addictive to mash the buttons and see what happens :D Even an unmodded midifighter provides hours of fun, even if (like me and unlike my brother) you're not terribly musical.

Anyway, we had a little setback - think we may have fried the atmel mcu.. :'( but once its all finished and cleaned up, I intend on releasing the code and writing a blog post about it, which I'll probably submit to HN.
Our presenters used it at last month's DrupalCon in Chicago.

On the plus side, you can build very quickly once you get the hang of it and not get sidetracked with a lot of formatting options. It's also nice to be able to flip to a non-linear mode where you can just click to whatever it is you want to talk about and not flip back through your slides. The zooming provides for very simple hiding and emphasis of points, including "hiding" extra content for future sharing (eg, embedding).

The big downside is you have to be really careful with the panning and zooming. What seems like 'just a little' when your building can easily feel like an amusement park ride when it's on a big screen. Also, you can't upload to slideshare unless you record it as a video first.

Overall, we were very happy with it, and the audience seemed to enjoy it. But you definitely want to build some practice Prezi's before doing the real thing. We found it very useful, but it has the potential to be very distracting if you aren't careful.
I don't think you lose "good at math" if you're actually good at math. Being actually good at math, as I'd define it, means you understand problem solving and logical reasoning. It's not about computational techniques. Most math professors have to review linear algebra and the calculus sequence before they can teach their first undergraduate class.

It's like this: if you study a language intensely for a year, you'll have a good understanding of it after that year. If you stop using it, the grammar will remain with you but your vocabulary will fade over time. If, however, you travel back to that country, it'll only take you a couple weeks to regain took you a year the first time around. Math is a language, and what you lose is vocabulary, not the language itself.

I'm 27 and have been out of school for 5 years. I couldn't do integration by parts without consulting a textbook, and I'd probably do poorly on a Calc-3 final if I had to take it closed-book, right now, in the alloted time. But I also know where to look when I need to review calculus or linear algebra. There's a huge difference between "rusty" and lost skills.

For "rusty", you just need to study again. It starts out hard and gets easier as you regain the skills. It's actually fun, at least for me, to revisit familiar friends like set theory. And I'm still learning new things (although not at as fast a rate as when I was in school) even though I've been out of school for half a decade.
I've been reading Fred's blog for a few years now, but I think this post ignores or underestimates quite a few things that you need if you want to be a thought leader:

1. Be early - Fred was one of the first VC bloggers to give people a real time glimpse of his thoughts.

2. Be consistent - There were some notable VC's who blogged before him, but none with the daily pace he has consistently met for years. This regularity is hugely important.

3. Be successful - He has amazing credibility based on his investment portfolio. With their thesis driven approach, USV has assembled the best collection of "Large communities of engaged users" in tech. He has also invested in companies that have become some of the biggest brand names in tech e.g. Twitter/Zynga.

4. Be talented - I can think of a few VCs that meet most of the above criteria, but Fred is a really good writer with a strong POV. He almost always brings a fresh thought to stale issues and rarely uses his blog as a commercial for his investments.

5. Be Human - If you read Fred's blog you know what music he's into, where he vacations to, what his kids are interested in. He's a full personality, not just a repository of info about term sheets or financing structures.

I think the points that the OP makes are important, but are not the primary cause of Fred's success.
Since they stated they're not listening to people who say it's under $100K, then obviously their sample set was skewed.
Stuning pencil drawings that look like photographs by Paul Lung
It’s hard to belive but all these beautiful pictures are not photos but pencil drawings. The author of such unbelievable art is 38-year-old graphic artist from Hong Kong Paul Lung. 0.5 mm technical pencil and A2 paper are the only attributes of these masterpieces. Check these beautiful artworks by yourself.
I think there is.
Woot! Love Wicker Park. And GiveForward. :)
Logitech gaming mouses actually come with weights that let you do just this. Its theoretically for better game performance but I think it speaks to your point that sometimes weight gives a more satisfying tactile response.

http://www.logitech.com/en-us/mice-pointers/mice/devices/575...
I've been wondering the same thing. It's hard to find/meet Hackers in Chicago unless you're already working at a startup.

Perhaps we need a meetup in Chicago that is similar to 106 Miles...
Bing for iPad a 'killer app'
im not a fan of microsoft stuff, but they did a really good job on ipad version of bing, also iphone version is pretty cool and useful

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9215608/Bing_for_iPad_a_killer_app_says_analyst

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bing/id345323231?mt=8
You are right, there is a sub-gendre of entertainment software that does have similarity to art. But even there you'll never buy a product because it crashes, while a work of Art can be valuable because it is ugly
>But from everything that I have read, the corruption is actually less today than it was a hundred years ago.

If that is the case then awareness of the corruption is what has changed. If government represents the interests of an elite rather than the electorate at large than that system is dysfunctional and may be subject to a correction.

>Oh the system is working, alright. It just isn't working for _you_. :-P

My comments criticizing the system have received healthy upvoting, so it would seem that I'm not expressing a fringe opinion. Outside of Hacker News, stats showing steadily increasing economic polarization in the US are a solid indicator of an out-of-balance system.
Time is not a fixed unit of measure. I may be going closer to the speed of light than a project manager, so one week to me, might be like 5 years to them.
I both agree and disagree. Git in its simple use case can be pretty simple. If there's a programmer handy to fix things when merges get angry, or things like that, it can be as simple as dropping two scripts on the designer's desktop -- one to commit and push; one to pull.

> Why don't you learn photoshop and how to do basic design? That way you don't need to ask the designer to do minor tweaks.

I know you're trying to be facetious here, but I think it's actually a good idea. Why bother someone else to make a simple fix (I'm thinking typo-correction level here)?
I'm actually happy to find this competitor because it validates a lot of my thinking and confirms that a market exists for this type of service.

At this time the other company has a more "feature rich" solution already built which is very similar to what I would provide. My product is basically vaporware today.

I'm wondering how to approach my customers about this other site without pushing them to that solution. Sounds like you are suggesting to use a strong list of differentiators. That seems like a good idea.

Talking to some of the other guy's customers sounds good too.
Competition is only real when a significant number of your potential customers know of it. It sounds like a relatively small percentage of people know of mindbodyonline (obviously the groups you have talked to haven't). So the only danger is if both that company and your company become huge; and that's not something to be worried about now.
If I remember correctly, Varnish by default will use the standard HTTP headers to cache the content. This is my preferred way "configuring" Varnish. I like letting the app decide how to cache it's content rather than putting a bunch of special rules in VCL.

Some people strip out the cache headers once it hits Varnish, but I prefer to let the user agents cache the resources locally and use Varnish as a stop-gap for the misbehaving user agents.

As with everything, YMMV
Zynga, Facebook Spark 51% Jump in Value of Top Web Startups