skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know that the type of posts to Hacker News has rather drifted away from topics strictly relevant to hackers and start-ups - indeed we are seeing an increasing quantity of spam postings which are a nuisance.

However posting a link to the UK Daily Mail (the kindest description for this rag would be to call it a comic) is a step too far.
Are there any estimates on how much total has gone into iphone apps? We know what the market's worth (approximately).
I'm not a YC applicant. Part of this was because Paul Graham made it pretty clear that he believes that having a family is at odds with a startup: http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html

The charitable part of me wants to believe the "I'm not willing to take responsibility..." angle, but it treads awfully close to discrimination.

I assumed that this would work against us to the point where it wasn't worth applying. The same way that single founder teams are canned almost before they are read.

Note that it doesn't actually matter if this is the case. My impression based on public information led me to this conclusion and YC lost out on a great team and idea. I'm sure I'm not alone.

I'm putting my money where my mouth is: the rest of my cofounders are also all married. Most of us have kids.

We're doing just fine, thanks:

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/07/prweb1139914.htm

http://blog.luckycal.com/?p=15

http://gigaom.com/2008/08/25/mobilize-launchpad-contestants-...
TOP 10 DATING DO’S. at Fresh Start After Divorce Blog
That's also the reason you're getting VC money. Because you have something to do with it. If you answer 'I can't grow' (can't find programmers). You are saying: no need for investment. If you say: I don't need VC money and still get it, that's a bubble.
Like. Implemented.
Social Media Optimization Basics - Video
ah, Z-80, another great* technology that didn't win.

* ==I liked
This is a very specific personality type that's just rare enough that all of them think they're the only ones. But given the number of "my god, you must be stalking me" responses... there may be enough of these guys out there that this merits investigation. Many of their problems are misdiagnosed as being due to something else. All of them are headed to a mental downswing or an epic failure of some sort and its critical that they understand themselves well enough that they can aid other people in directing/collaborating/steering them effectively.
Watch Family Guy TV Show
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Imagine how easier and cheaper it would be if you could Download Naruto Episodes. The reality is that you can actually download all Naruto Episodes from the Internet at very High Speed
The Smalltalk Workspace with the debugger, the inspectors and the whole image at your beck and call is irb/iPhython an order of magnitude more powerful!

If you want something like a command line, you can write it fairly easily. You could probably subclass it from the Workspace.

But why would you want to? Most Smalltalks have lots of context-aware goodness! If you are browsing on the class side, highlighting code and executing does it in the context of the class. If you are looking at an instance in the inspector, it does it in the context of that object instance! If you are in the debugger, writing and executing code does it in the context of that stack frame!

Those last two bits of context-awareness have been the environment where I have done some of my best debugging and coding in the past decade!

Command-line or highlight/right-click is only the medium. The message is the thing! Think of it as like adjusting to the controls of a new video game.
This past Friday we had a game of Capture the Flag in my city's financial district. About 600 people came out... no warning given to the cops, no permission, nothing. Was a good time, our side won 2-0 (go blue!) thanks to some solid defense. We were warned at the start of the game to obey traffic laws (ie, don't jaywalk), because the police response to events like this isn't freaking out and cracking down like you'd expect, or saying "go have some fun" like others would expect. Rather, it's "Sweet, we'll make quota in one night!"

Afterward I went to a parkour jam in a nearby district park with some well placed ledges that lead to the potential for a lot of stunts. After 20 minutes, we noticed a cop car on the street, partially hidden by a wall -- looked like they were watching us, so, as an inquisitive sociologist, I went over to ask them what was up.

As it turns out, they were there for an unrelated reason -- to watch that road because of an illegal left turn onto it out of the entertainment district. Basically the way their trap works is that everyone is drinking in their vehicles, and the illegal turn gives the cops the opportunity to check the vehicle for alcohol, and let them off with a warning if they don't find any. Pretty clever, really.

I asked them about parkour, pointing to my friends in the park behind me climbing, jumping and rolling around. They told me that technically it's illegal under a bylaw that bans games in public areas -- the same law which renders ball-hockey in the street illegal. Then they went on to say that this gives them full authority to break it up and issue tickets if they wanted to, but police policy is to only ever enforce this law if they receive complaints.

Thus, in this one evening, I saw three approaches to laws and law enforcement:

1) Policy designed for monetary gain; if they really wanted to stop the jaywalking, they could've just told us all to go home, but handing out tickets for it helps them make quota, so they let us play.

2) Laws which exist as an excuse to investigate for other laws; by having apparently unreasonable traffic restrictions, they can crack down on drunk driving without invading people's privacy.

3) Laws which exist as an excuse to punish related but unlegislatable behaviour; in the case of both parkour and ballhockey, the issue is "creating a public nuisance," not the specific behaviour being done. However, a nuisance is hard to define objectively, so when it, in the mind of the cops, becomes subjectively a nuisance, they instead use another, easy to define but unreasonable, law.

In all three cases we have laws that aren't actually intended to prevent the behaviour they prohibit, but each does so in a different way... and that was just one evening and discussions I had with three police officers, I'm sure many more examples abound.
JamLegend Takes On Guitar Hero On The Web (1,000 Invites)
You lost me past the first sentence.
So you can 'claim' anyone's comments as your own?
Downmodded for begging.
you can trust all lawyers the same way you can trust all programmers design mission-critical software

you simply can't
Interesting writing but lots of sweeping generalizations which leaves me with nothing to take away from the article. The word "eccentric" means "unusual" - i.e. not prone to sweeping generalizations.
It's VERY safe. Try starting a restaurant. You have to borrow money, you need to handle staffing, fire problems, etc. That's a risky business. A web business, if it fails, you lose nothing.

We businesses are really very low risk business. Mostly, in case of failure, you just lose some time.
This is a nice product. Do you have an API that would allow one specify a company name and it returns a feed or so of mentions? Anything like that planned?
Ask HN:Where to turn for office designs?
We are in the process of moving to new offices, and would like an interior designer to coordinate and plan the move. Where do startups find good, cheap Interior Designers that might also work remotely (we are based in athens, greece)? Names, Links everything appreciated...
Some good basics that go a long ways.

Though, I don't think most hackers really need to bother buying fonts. That's an extra. :-)

Other good info:

Presentation Zen (http://www.presentationzen.com/) -- both the blog and the book.

Guy's 10 / 20 / 30 rule: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html
[not criticizing but curious]: what's your competitive advantage with respect to Google?

Google's blog search doesn't search blog comments, and doesn't (explicitly) search on comment author. But google could add these things easily. What protects you? I'm guessing:

(a) this niche is too small/specialized for google to care; or
(b) if google did care, they buy you. Liquidity event!
I agree.

Though the customer may be afraid that the developer can just start piling hours without real productive work. Still, I think the customer has the possibility of asking for a replacement of the consultants if he does not see good results. Later on in the project may be harder but still possible.
"Facebook: The Movie" - West Wing writer plans big screen story
We have different hourly fees for time and materials (T&M) and fixed price (FP). We want the customer to lean on the T&M side.
Eavesdropping on Expressions (Ruby)
Yes. This personality type is prone to making sweeping generalizations. I'll put that down as another generalization about him.
But in most software projects there are a lot more variables than in painting a house.
Very cool. But apart from the fact that this is all assembly, I have no idea what the hell is happening. Still, very cool...
Yes, there is a bit of reinvention, but I would prefer JS to take over from Flash. Flash just doesn't integrate as nicely with the standard the web paradigms ...

jQuery just rocks.
Interesting.

There's a game called riffmaster that I discovered via addictinggames.com (http://www.addictinggames.com/riff.html) that was pretty fun to play. It has similar keyboard options. There is also a sequel (http://www.addictinggames.com/riffmasterii.html), but I haven't played it.

When I first saw it, I thought it would be boring, but there are some elements that make it pretty fun.
I had a couple of spare minutes so I did a JavaScript implementation.

http://gist.github.com/7727
What's SUP?: FriendFeed's Modest RSS Proposal
Caveat Emptor: Align Cloud Computing Goals with Provider
This article is actually an offshoot from the post:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=287570

Fog Creek Software tried to model itself on this company, but as Joel pointed out, it did not really work out 'that' well.
Ask HN: List of websites categorized by visitors' gender and age-group?
Hi All,

Is there list of websites available which is categorized by visitors' gender and age-groups? For example, I guess Digg.com would be mostly visited by males, aged between 15-30. So is there any alexa kind of ranking which lists top websites by visitor's A/S/L?

-Paras
World according to Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The first post on the topic was mostly negative-- with good reason.

If us slacker/failure/mad-genius types want to hold on to the fiction that there's a place for us somewhere, then please back off and let us fool ourselves about it for a while. Hey... it may inspire us to a turn over a new leaf and adapt to other people's needs a little more. (Until we get distracted by something else and then start blowing everybody off again....)
Bill by the hour, unless you want lots of bucks. If you do, suck it up and learn to go fixed price. I never had the guts to do it.

Hourly billing is not perfect. There are lots of ways to screw it up too. The author should have told you that.

Work any better? I've been told I ramble. Hope that helps.
An API is one of our top priorities.
"... Yes, the list comprehension beats it all. It’s simple and elegant. Most importantly beautiful and pleasing to look at. ..."

''.join(chr(48+((ord(c)>>b)&1)) for b in xrange(7,-1,- 1))

One line I like I was using today. Of course there is always the chance the person using the big stupid language can also use other smaller succinct ones.
The Base64 issue should be relatively minor as long as you're gzip-encoding everything your server sends. (the iPhone supports that, right?) Each base64 byte only has 6 bits of entropy so it'll compress well. I'd be more worried about maintaining efficient caching with this technique.
Bitten by the Red Hat Perl bug?
I think the point is: the more you learn, the more you realize how much you don't know.

I present an example from personal experience. It's not so much that I didn't know the concept being discussed, but rather the example I will present was used to kick off my real analysis class three days ago.

Consider a number, B (B for bad). Let B be the limit of the alternating harmonic series as the number of terms approaches infinity. The professor showed by merely switching the location of parentheses and rearranging terms that this same series can be shown to sum to 1.5B. Naturally, the number B, the limit, approaches ln 2. But by rearranging the terms, he showed otherwise. The point of the lecture was to show that the human mind, unless trained in the concept of limits at infinity, falls short. Now I know the reason why he was able to prove this was due to a result of Riemann, specifically that conditionally convergent series can be made to sum to anything you want by rearranging the terms in a sufficient manner (see Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis for a proof), much of the class was stumped as to why this occurred. Just when you think you have mastered something as beautiful as the calculus, when you start to dig deeper into the theoretical underpinnings of it, you realize that there is so much more to learn.
Glad you're enjoying it. Clickpass is awesome indeed, but there are a couple things we need to fix. Thanks for spotting that.
Well, I subscribed to the blog so he must have done something right. Ooh, hold on, I gotta go get coffee.
Does anyone happen to know why the Mazda RX7's and 8's keep using this type of engine? It makes no sense that all their other cars don't.
It was in a recent WSJ article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121979585463374795.html
...did they all get sucked in? "Man, I TOLD my direct report not to stand in front of that thing when I turned it on..."
Same here. At the time I was busy being a teenager, going to school, and all that stuff. When I got to college and took CS1 I was hooked. I think the switch from mostly schoolwork that didn't interest me (in high school) to mostly schoolwork that did (college) is what did it. I finally had time to concentrate on programming.
The two guys have an advantage - lots of former editors are sick of Wikipedia, and non-deletionists have nowhere to go. I don't see any reason why two guys in a garage couldn't succeed.
Perhaps I've made it sound more dramatic than it should be. It is, as in all things, a spectrum of possibilities, not a black and white thing. That said, there's a type of person that becomes a hacker. While it is a choice, just like being an athlete or a musician, it's also a temperament that not all people possess. So, one might enjoy technology and find it useful to understand it, or one might find it to be the most satisfying and interesting thing to spend time on--and this, I believe, is a trait exhibited very early.

I don't, of course, think only the latter should be "allowed" to write code or make a living with technology (nearly everyone will be a knowledge worker in the coming years, so no one can avoid it). I just think they tend to be the ones producing the code that runs the Internet and everything else of real interest in the technology world. It's just such a deep subject that one really has to love it to have any chance of being seriously productive in the field. So, while I believe one can learn to play a musical instrument as an adult, if you aren't passionate enough about it to spend many hours each day on it (and not in a hardcore slamming your fingers down on the keyboard one more time...just in the sense of always learning about the subject and always expanding your horizons), you probably won't be a great musician. It doesn't make it any less valid a pursuit--as long as you derive pleasure from the time you spend with it, it's a productive use of time. Likewise hacking...but you probably won't produce work of significant note without a pretty strong drive to do so.

So, I guess I should make clear that I don't believe any talent is natural (excepting a few prodigies, perhaps) or inborn, certain traits are. And there are traits that are deeply ingrained that just make a big difference in whether one will enjoy the hacking process. Also note that I'm not claiming to be particularly far down that spectrum, or to have produced any significant work in the field. I was both a computer nerd and a music nerd very early in life, and I didn't choose to focus almost completely on technology until my mid-twenties.
Also see http://kcombinator.com
The GeoJSON spec:
As if newspapers and books are reliable. I'd trust a comment at this website about YC by a YC applicant over a Business Week article.
That's the main reason why languages like C++ and Java are so popular. Getting paid for amount of time or amount of code makes succinct and simple solutions less interesting for developer.

As we all know, succinctness = power. Everybody lose in the long run when developers are not motivated to solve the problem in less time with less code and as simple as possible.

I'm amazed that some people treat it as something "so basic".
Right. And I didn't get it until I was a year out of college. When you know it's what you want to do, you go out and do it (this is a definition of adulthood).
JParallax: Creating the animation like layer controlling, positioning...
"... Where do startups find good, cheap Interior Designers that might also work remotely ..."

ARCHitect. ARCHitect ... Up there.... Up there.

Joel Spolsky has thought extensively on this problem ~ http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html Joel lets the Architects design and build offices that are not cheap and for good reason ~ http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080601/how-hard-could-it-be-ad...
So how does it relate to IT consultants - would you say that it is completely different with lawyers? Maybe all IT consultants are ethical, too, but many are still clueless. Still, they manage to find their customers, and they are in high demand, too. Are lawyers in general less clueless?

I must admit that it often freaks me out to consider that other professions are just as messed up as the software world. For example, in medicine there is in all likelihood an equivalent to LISP and an equivalent to Java. Many hospitals might have invested in useless expensive machinery (Bea Weblogic, Oracle...), and now use it on their patients, even though better treatments are already available.

If not, I wonder how medicine has solved the problem that the IT world can't seem to get a grip on.
Anyone used lat49 for geo-targeted ads?
I was considering using lat49 (http://lat49.com) for serving ads; just wondering if anyone else has used them and what their impressions were.
That would be a useless article, but it would be harmless, assuming a sane policy that doesn't allow for terabyte-long articles that strain server resources. Nobody would link to it and nobody would read it, even if your really posted it - which you wouldn't, because you have better things to do.
CS theory for high school sophomores: Prof. Mitzenmacher
Yes. And self understanding can help avoid some of the counter productive if not destructive advice that comes from the "mainstream".

It may sound like obligatory appeasement, but the "different not better" language really does come to apply to one's understanding as one ages. Particularly if you've not been successful, and observe those around you who were once a bit in awe of what you could do, having successful lives (in your own eyes) while you continue to flounder from one poor fit to the next.

If I'd known then, what I know now, I could have made some better choices. I feel I've squandered a lot of what I have to offer. I'm most happy when I am truly helping others, but the course I've ended up on has left me largely at odds with one poor fit after another, wherein I largely end up making everyone miserable.

Just by way of explanation, for myself I've taken some damage along the way that makes it hard to just change (the discomfort is very distracting; also, I need to maintain group health care coverage). I hope that messages like this will reach those who are like me, so that they might avoid forcing themselves into roles that promote such damage, physical and/or mental.

Life's just plain not easy, for many, and there are no guarantees. I can only say that, for myself, as I've learned more about my own personality and how it does and does not fit into the world, I've become better able to cope. The author is describing a group of people who are very bright, but who also (in my case, at least) have a strong need for a social connection. Knowledge like this can better enable them to approach that on their own terms, and perhaps to then be happy with the results.
I'm a founder who's married with two kids (27 years old). One of the reasons I'm not able to join YC on even the east coast (I live a couple hours from Boston) is my family. I can't move them or myself away from them for a 'boot camp', just not feasible.

I think YC is missing out on some great opportunities but that's just my viewpoint.
Bell Labs Kills Fundamental Physics Research
One of the most harmful results of fixed-bid contracting is that it gives offshore developers a huge advantage. It'll take them three times as long and they'll ship a worse product, but the "shipped" cost will still be lower. You don't see the hidden costs like maintainability and poor code quality until afterwards.
Good to know that they obeyed rule #1 for game design: "Never trust the client!"
Wow a 350z, that must have been rough.
This type of engine is much more complicated and expensive to manufacture. Mazda owns a lot of patents dealing with heat expansion of metal alloys and other stuff related to manufacturing these engines. So they only put them in high margin cars, and stick with the old cheap engine for everything else.
True, and worth noting. Also of interest: Ruby 1.9 includes a different implementation of the K Combinator, Object#tap. It's a method rather than a pseudo-function, so instead of:

returning (Fubar.new) do |f|
...
end

Your write:

Fubar.new.tap do |f|
...
end

Shameless plug-whoring: The andand gem includes an enhanced Object#tap: http://andand.rubyforge.org
Like how soon are we talking of here? Couple of weeks? Or couple of months?
The house painting analogy fails because in software development, you only have a vague idea of how big the "house" is.

No painter would give an estimate for painting a house, sight unseen, with only vague descriptors. But yet that's exactly what fixed-bid contracting is for software development.
The first post on the topic was mostly negative-- with good reason.

You consider that post negative? That might be another strange trait worth thinking about...

(Like many at HN, I'm afflicted with nearly all of the traits under discussion. But I'm not of the opinion that it is due to a new magical type of brain.)
I always thought there should be another April Fools's in August. Kind of symmetrical
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=288894
Does New York City need more VCs?
It doesn't hurt that, while Flash (e.g. versions 9, 10) is getting faster (Lower CPU usage), Javascript in the browser is becoming insanely fast.

Flash is quickly becoming irrelevant in categories it seemed to be the only option.
This one is much better commented: http://umlautllama.com/projects/pacdocs/mspac/mspac.asm (for Ms. Pac-man).
Not to be a pedant, but this is not really the parallax effect. Parallax happens when you receive multiple images of the same object simultaneously from different perspectives. This library gives you simulated depth from the animation of a single image.
Venture capitalists today look far and wide for start-ups
Trying to assimilate all of the data... trying not to jump to premature conclusions.... Trying to be clear without being overly romantic or pessimistic....

I want a Jean Piaget to work out the experiments and pin down this further....