skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dwight Eisenhower famously said, "Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."

My point is that it is NOT impossible to plan for. Many aspects of having kids are quite predictable, including all the issues that the OP was asking about. I've tweaked the blog post a bit to hopefully make this clearer.

P.S. And maybe I don't really know how hard it is to raise kids. It may well be even harder than I imagine. But that doesn't change the fact that anyone who waits until two months after the kid is born to figure out who is going to take care of it has not planned ahead adequately.
Congratulations! I love the idea of skimming myspace's events so that I don't have to look at their site and use the doubtlessly terrible search function they have.

Cut the adwords and the digg/share widgets. They're not going to get you money or traffic, respectively, and they look trashy.

The list of upcoming shows looks terrible: the left edge doesn't line up with the left edge of the div above it, and the inset scroll doesn't match the rest of the look/feel, and I'm seeing a pixel's worth of one element and it looks like a glitch. This needs a lot of work.

Use a normal dropdown for the 'playing' menu: inconsistent UI elements are bad, and that one would be bad even if it weren't inconsistent.

Populate the map with markers immediately rather than waiting till someone clicks on an artist.

The music player isn't working for me: standard ff3/windows.

Your fonts feel inconsistent: pick a bold typeface for titles/buttons/logo, and a plain typeface for standard text.

Most of what I'm saying is really basic stuff, so honestly, I suspect you're doing something basic wrong. If you've heard it a bunch of times before, you're either being lazy or stubborn. If not, you're not asking for enough feedback from friends, family, at tech meetups, etc.
Perl on Google App Engine
Pretty cool in principle. The IP geodetection thing is really great.

I agree that the layout could use a lot of work. It's rather difficult to use on my X60 (1024x768 resolution).

Also, the filtering is very nice, but there's still a bit of information overload for me since there are over a hundred shows playing near where I live, in the genres I'm interested in, on a random saturday.

An extra feature that may be help alleviate that problem could be integration with some other site/service/application that already knows my musical tastes. For example, I've already spent a fair amount of time telling iTunes, Last.fm, pandora, and facebook what I like. It would be great if you could leverage that to provide me with a better filter.
Thanks Maro,

I had the map smaller originally, but the bigger map just seems more engaging. I do put markers on the map after you click on a result. I thought it would be useless to have a bunch of markers on the map first, as you aren't going to decide on a show based on the location, but it's good to see the location after.

Thanks for the input.
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That's AWESOME feedback sawndrost.
I'm not being lazy, but just haven't been getting that kind of feedback - tech meetups are not de rigueur in my hometown of Whistler BC.

I'm not a huge fan of the look, and i've been tweaking and tweaking it. Even hired a designer, but we conflicted on a bunch of elements and this is what I ended up with.

It's a shame the player isn't working. I haven't heard that yet, and that is the best part - listen so you can discover the artists.

I specifically didn't want to populate the map with markers as it would just be full of markers, and you won't really decide to go to a show based on where it is, rather than who is playing, so I think the site would get just too busy with that.

But I'll definately be working on everything else you mentioned. Kinda makes me wish I could take down this post for now and repost later. ;)
Someone is wrong on the internet?
I like the big map: you've done a good job of building a color scheme that makes it look like part of the design. However, you should put the markers on the map: it's not going to be the basis for the decision about which show I'm going to, but it looks good, and it helps the user, and it doesn't hurt anything.
"my hometown of Whistler BC" -- ah, okay. You can try for the same effect via irc, try #startups on freenode.net. (http://www.mibbit.com lets you use irc via your browser.) You can also start a tech meetup, it's a lot easier than it looks, and you might be surprised at who shows up. Email local web developers, etc, sniff for interest. It might also be worth your time to take a trip to vancouver when there's something cool happening -- aside from the direct benefits of feedback, etc, it's really motivating.
>> I am in my mid-forties, married, with no kids. But that does not mean that I do not know how hard it is to raise kids.

You really don't know how hard it is to raise kids. And with all due respect, just so you know, kids are not startups.
Actually, the ip geolocation got me wrong, which is odd, considering eg ip2location.com got it right. Switch providers?
SAP Listing that includes all SAP customers.
SAP Listing that includes all SAP customers.
Let's call it affirmative action.
I mapped the windows keys on my keyboard to the underscore character, and disabled the normal one to force myself to get in the habit of using it. It takes a bit of getting used to but now I_can_type_these_all_day without wrist strain.
Also, when you're moving the map center, scroll rather than reload: I forget the syntax, but you can see an example of what I mean by clicking here:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q...

...and clicking the topmost photo on the map.
The article complains about 'gimmicks'. People around here believe in producing tangible prototypes for $15,000 in three months, what can you expect but gimmicks?
"it would just be full of markers" -- you're right, you don't want a ton of markers, but if a search has more than (say) 10 results, you probably need to paginate anyway.
Finding stuff to read is the easy part. It's finding the time to read it all properly that I'm struggling with.
Critics say laptop searches at US border cross the line
I've had a similar experience to this also. I suspect it's a case of the Blub Paradox.

A few months ago I was watching a Java programmer write a text processing program.
I found it frustrating to watch as he struggled with even basic stuff like reading files, regex's and string splitting.

But here's the thing.. I couldn't even remember myself how to match or replace a string based on a regex.

I consider myself a fairly smart programmer, but I probably couldn't write a Java program to read a file and match some regular expressions without looking at the API. Java makes it hard!

Perhaps this example isn't very fair to Java, but this kind of thing comes up all the time.

I'm sure even the 'average' Java programmer would have no trouble doing this in Ruby (or Python, take your pick) in 2 minutes.
I enjoyed this post. For what it's worth, I often think of my startup as a kid (the analogy works both ways). Once the startup website went "live", it reminded me a lot of dealing with an infant. Site goes down any hour of the night, needs constant attention and tlc and doesn't give you much satisfaction for the first few months of its existence.

And I have 2 kids along with the startup, so I'd like to think I speak from experience. My personal feeling is that if you can handle raising a kid, you may be surprised at how prepared you are to handle a startup!
"Libertarian" can mean something besides "idealistic capitalist."
HN Feature request: message pending annunciator on home page
I just missed a bunch of responses to comments that I had made because I forgot to browse my "threads" link for a couple of days. It would be really great to have a little annunciator like reddit has to tell you that someone has responded to something you've written. (On reddit it's the little envelope icon that turns red, but it could be anything.)

Should be about three lines of Arc, right? :-)
didn't know I could do that. Completely new to working with the maps.

I've made a few of the more minor changes you recommended (including the scrolling), and just uploaded it to the server, but I think the fonts/images, etc is going to take me some time. Probably won't get that sorted today.

But you've really opened my eyes, shawndrost, I can't thank you enough.

I'll be making lots of changes over the next few days I'm sure.
James Hong from "Founders at Work":

"And nothing ever goes according to plan. You can’t dwell on the fact that your plan didn’t work. In our case, we didn’t even have a plan, but it would have been worthless to have one anyway, since we just kept moving as fast as we could. You have to hustle; you can’t just have a plan and cakewalk it. You just have to know what direction you’re going in and run around like a rat in a maze trying to get out."

Had James posted a question in a forum like this seeking advice at that early, clueless stage in his company's history, you probably would have chided him for his lack of sufficient up-front planning. Yet his story is indicative of many of the other founders profiled in the book, and many other founders that I admire. The reason these founders are successful is not because they are master planners, it's because they are master improvisers, a quality shared, I believe, by good parents.

Yes, kids are like startups, but pre-birth plans will change, and they are not what will make you successful as a founder or a parent. And if you haven't had kids or started a company, then your advice in those realms doesn't carry much weight.
Nreece's corollary to Hofstadter's law: raising kids is harder than you think even when you take into account nreece's corollary to Hofstadter's law. :-)

> Kids are not startups.

Of course they are. They aren't startup companies, they are startup humans, but they are definitely startups.
That's a good example...and whenever I've brought up examples along those lines, a Java developer will say, "But how often do those kinds of problems come up?" And, then I pause to think about it, and I can't help but respond, "What programming problems aren't that kind?" When I think about development, I'm thinking, "get some data, work on it, write it out", and Java makes those tasks pretty complex.

I know there are problems for which Java is a great choice. Google is not made up of stupid people, and they have a lot of Java code...it's their go to language for systems-level development. But I can't think of any task that I write software for that would be better served by Java than Perl, Ruby, Python and probably even Smalltalk or Scheme or Lisp (though the latter three are weak when it comes to interacting with the system, and I build web-based systems management software--Smalltalk and Scheme and Lisp might be fine for the web-based part, but not so much on the systems management part, while Perl was pretty much designed for the purpose).
I hope you're not implying that kids have the same failure rates as startup companies. It really seems like you're trying to force the analogy here.

+1 for the corollary though :-)
Seattle City Guide
Seattle Washington is a beauiful city in the Pacific Northwest, your guide to Seattle restaurants, Seattle attractions, Seattle travel, Seattle entertainment.
He never said he waited two months to plan. He just said that he was still facing those issues two months after the kid was born.

He seems like a smart and responsible guy. The logical conclusion that most of us would come to is that raising kids is almost always harder than one expects. Instead you somehow are convinced he should've rationally planned more. And you are so confident of this without knowing anything about how he planned.
MYOB Indonesia - How to do initial bank reconciliation
Hire a developer. It's what Kevin Rose did and he's just about to sell out to Goog for $200m.
Order a CD containing the song from Amazon.
I remember the first time I visited Vimeo - compared to other video sites at the time, it left a strong impression that they focused on creative videos. Losing money + legal liability + an idea of what sort of community they want to create = harsh measures.
A bugged life: Running P-Lisp on Apple ][
Please don't take down the homepage. I love your blogs and plan to read them all finally but it will take some time.
Kai-Fu Lee keynote at SIGIR: "The Google China Experience"
Why the Google generation isn’t as smart as it thinks
2 cups coffee to wake up in the morning and 2 cups to stay awake in the afternoon.Sometimes I replace it by tea. I'm still sleeping well in the night :-)
What about the Digg API? Will Google kill it? I ask because Google and APIs are not on best of terms.
The most important thing to tell your kids is, "Just don't die."
What all OS need is a simpler way to freeze things. My mom constantly calls me because the UI has changed due to accidental clicks, and my instructions don't work anymore. For example, my explanation for attaching pictures to mails (a REALLY complicated task) involves dragging them to the windows icon on the task bar, but somehow her Gnome task bar keeps losing the "windows selector". One accidental click and all effort has been wasted.

Even my own system I would like to be able to freeze. Firefox 3 seems to have gotten quite bad, for example occasionally it accidentally triggers the "change page direction" switch (which btw. seems like the most stupid option ever, this should be buried somewhere 100 layers deep, not top level).
"by a female hacker"! you should be ashamed of yourself
is it just me or is the scenario he describes fundamentally wrong. if we want to poison 'Bob's' nameserver, we have to get 'Alice' to send a request to the legitimite nameserver of victim.com, and then spoof the request to ALICE, not Bob. Its almost as if he's changed the meaning of Alice and Bob in the final scenario.
Too much... My goal is to quit, but while having to keep regular office hours it is very hard. That's why for my next contract I'll try to avoid "bodytime".
This is a great service, although IP autodetect didn't work for me. It wasn't a problem to search for London (it didn't go to Canada, at least!).

The map could be sized differently depending on resolution, so you don't have to scroll.

The genre list needs an overhaul. If you search for Ambient, it returns bands that claim to be Metal / Ambient, which is not the same! I like to find things by genre.

Is this primarily a nicer interface to myspace music?
Maybe my brain has been fried by spending too much time on Hacker News, but isn't there an 'it is' missing from the title?

'Tests clearly show that a switched-on television reduces the quality and quantity of interaction between children and their parents. The internet multiplies the effect a thousandfold.'

If you've got scientific evidence to back up your claims, please link to it. I'd like to know what the SI unit for parent/child interaction is.

I don't like the article much, but has anyone read the book he refers to?
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I went through similar pains getting the data off of my Amiga systems before I sold them when moving to the valley (I'd long since gotten rid of all of my C64 stuff, so not quite as ancient). It's surprisingly complicated when all of the "usual" methods (USB memory key, CD/DVD ROM, network) are unavailable. Even though the Amiga could write to a 720K DOS format floppy, I no longer have any machines that have a floppy drive, and I had several things to move that were too big, anyway, and would have had to be split via whatever archiving program I used on the Amigas (lzh, maybe?) which I didn't remember how to do. I used to connect to the Internet via modem on the Amiga, which might have worked, but I no longer have a phone line to hook it up to or dial up internet service.

Ended up going the serial route, and still had to dig an old PC out of the closet because my current PCs don't have them. But, I finally did get all of my MODs off of the machines. Took about a week from deciding I was going to do it to getting the cable and software working.

And, "The Lives of Others" is a fantastic film.
Harvest the Sun — From Space
The Hacker from Mars
Startups are kids.
I think that the number one legal issue that new startups/founders run into is partnership issues - how to structure your company, what's in the Buy/Sell, how to dissolve, how to create cliffs, how vesting works. These are issues all small startups face and they are generic enough to draw a big audience. Best of luck!
Wow, that's upsetting. Midway through the article, I decided to subscribe there and then. The outro was quite the kick to the crotch.

@Reginald: Thanks for what I am sure will be a great set of archives to dig through if this post is any indication.
Breaking the Law of Demeter is Like Looking for a Needle in the Haystack
Top 10 Best Ever Hackers
im not libertarian, im anarchist, you can tell by my music taste http://www.last.fm/user/Pavelludia
Does exercising the executive function improve it, in the same way as exercising a muscle?

If so, what exercise-recovery time frame is ideal? is it similar to weight training, of sets, pushing to exhaustion, with brief recovery (of the order of minutes) in between, and on a longer timeframe, rest days?

Or does the executive function respond quite differently to exercise?
Giles Bowkett - What if there are no Gods?
The Personality Behind Online Gaming Site Bodog
a reddit-style toolbar (ie. so you can easily comment/vote after reading).

Is there a way to do this already?

EDIT I just read that some use the bookmarklet for this: apparently, when you submit a site that has already been submitted, it takes you to the comments on it. Actually, that method is more general, because it also works for article you found in non-hackernews ways. Thus, the hackernews comments become annotations of the article.

However, the bookmarklet requires that you submit the article. This is bad because (1) it's an extra click (2) it will submit the article, in the case where it has not been submitted already. I guess that second point is not so bad, but it would be nice to have a goto annotation bookmarklet, which went directly to the comments. I hereby request this as a feature.

This requires an operator like:

http://new.ycombinator.com/gotolink?u=[someURL]

that does a lookup to find the URL's id, and builds the following with it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=[URL's id]

(i.e. the code that is already present in the submitlink operator. It just needs to be exposed as an operator in its own right).

And an annotation bookmarklet like:

javascript:window.location=%22http://news.ycombinator.com/gotolink?u=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.location)+%22

shamelessly editing Phil Kast's bookmarklet
You'd be surprised how much I appreciate it. Startuppers and hackers and all.
Startups are kids because I've heard that once the your startup company is grown up and self sufficient (e.g. stable and profitable), the founding parents of the startup may tend to romanticize, overgeneralize, and/or forget (amnesia) how hard it was to raise their child during infancy and early years and beyond (when talking to other prospective parents)
Nissan To GM: Our Electric Car Will Make Money And Have No Emissions
In addition, there is currently a publication inflation affecting many aspects of science, and related to the infamous journal impact factor.

For example: in the past, only Science, Nature and Cell indulged in generating "previews", that is, little summary papers published within the same journal number as the papers it summarizes and cites. The only reason: to increase impact factor.

Why little journals didn't do it amounted to economic reasons: no time, no resources (all papers were dead-tree paper), and naivete. But nowadays many little journals have caught on, and publish editorial previews which, to hide a bit their real motivation, are often written not by editors but by invited authors from the same field.

Then there is the need for evaluation: how can a scientist evaluate another scientist from a different field? It's hard, and worse, it's very time consuming if it has to be done right. The truth is that it's easier to simply look at the number of publications and particularly, at the impact factor of the journals in which they were published. Which is no replacement, but it's used as if it is.

In all, what in the 1980's would have been one nice big, consistent paper, nowadays is published in multiple, small papers that cite each other in a chain. Just so your resume looks bigger that your competitors for those precious tenure track or group leader positions in science. This phenomenum is being institutionalized in the form of an increasing required amount of papers (no one ever mentions quality!) to be able to graduate and get your PhD!
Saving TV advertising the TiVo way
Don't all users read our 5,000 word privacy policy?
Ask YC: Spring and Struts2
I wanted to better appreciate the design choices that go with choosing Spring over Struts2 or the other way around. If you have used any of these Java frameworks please share your thought on them.
Adjustable Beds and Memory Foam Mattress
AstraBeds offer Memory foam mattresses, memory foam mattress toppers, Memory foam pillows, Bedding & adjustable beds.
Top 10 Concepts That Every Software Engineer Should Know
MySpace embraces OpenID (well, sort of)
Works well enough but looks bad. I would:

1) Get rid of the brown and orange combo - too 70's, and the orange doesn't work well with the orange lines of the map;

2) Move the map to the middle and have your results in a column on the right;

3) On the left, have a column for inputting the location data, have a clickable calendar to select a date, and have a slider bar so you can increase or decrease the "within" search area (or perhaps something like a target board where the middle is the location you put in and you click on an outer ring to widen your "within" area);

My personnel design philosophy is: reduce the number of clicks - that is, always try to reduce the number of clicks a user has to do to get the information they want. E.g. for the "within" drop down menu: one click to get to to drop down and another to select the option; a slider is one click to zoom in or out. Having a calendar already on screen removes the need to try and use the pop-up one, which again reduces the number clicks from a hover and click to just one. However, where you have lots of options, such as the genres, I think you still need a drop down menu because there are two many options to list....unless you put them all in some sort of bar. Don't know. Try it.

Anyway, I hope that made sense and helps. Good luck.
Parallels between our current economic times and the Great Depression
A year with Windows Vista
The site appears to be aimed at a world wide audience and therefore it would be nice if it handled metric units a little better.

e.g.
"2234 live shows on all dates within 25 miles of Sydney"

Maybe the units could be set based on ip range?
This may sound crazy

It only sounds crazy because this is 2008. 1968 you could have gotten away with running all your tasks overnight...
This seems like a great idea - I am going to see Kylie at the Newcastle Arena (UK) tomorrow night and the site showed Kylie as the first result! Cool!

One problem - the map is showing Newcastle somewhere in America! Oops! If I type in "Newcastle, Uk", the map jumps to the right place but the music results change and Kylie is no longer there...
Virtual World Is Sign Of Future For Scientists, Engineers
Purdue University is operating a virtual environment that enables scientists and engineers to interpret raw data collected with powerful instruments called dynamic atomic force microscopes.
I wonder if deciding which article to click on while browsing HN affects my ability to make business decisions....