skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thx. i tried to add a comment that the hyphenated commands "git-clone" are deprecated or discouraged. not sure what happend to it. Also not sure how aggressive they'll be about removing the hyphenated commands from future releases, google-fu on holiday today
Was the business really so specialized that only you could do it ?

Yes, unless I sold it to someone who was roughly just like me, which narrowed it down to a half dozen people. It was an Open Source based business, and a big part of its appeal was the fact that a well-known developer on the project was the one supporting the systems and software.

Selling it would have taken more time for a questionable payout. I wanted to move on to other things as soon as possible (and while it's taken a little over three years, one of those other things is now able to pay about the same as the old business when I left it).
Not very empirical but immensely entertaining. The piece on Trump University alone is worth the read.
I don't see any evidence being provided for the Facebook platform being used to help spammers, other than anecdotal evidence of people changing their login credentials and still being seen to send spam.

I think it would be interesting if it were shown that opening the platform directly led to exploits being used for spam, but this article doesn't seem to have any actual evidence. It's entirely speculative.
The current system I am working on has a history of developers...

How do you know that?

Imagine working on a system with no standards, documentation, version control system, or audit trail.

Oh wait, some of us don't have to imagine.
I'm from San Diego, and somehow I knew I'd find SDSU in this list!
thank god for recess!

Some states no longer have recess.
Pretty good. C is unmagical, but that doesn't keep developers from adding their own special magic...

Reading Guy Steele's late-1990s defenses of Java, and observing how C and C++ actually are used in industry -- yeah, I actually am happy that Sun managed to bring Joe Application Programmer about halfway to Lisp. In general, magic features like built-in garbage collection and all the basic collections in the standard library are a Good Thing. The main problem I see is that C is designed for systems programming, where everything really should be explicit, while most of the code that actually gets written belongs at a much higher abstraction level. Still, even in higher-level languages there are edge cases that make much more sense if you understand how the situation looks from the level of C -- for example, performance profiles.

(At the self-deprecating C shop where I worked last, I was the one deleting macros, wrapping lower-level code with Swig, and pushing Python and shell scripts for new code. We used glib, too -- which removes 10% of the pain while demonstrating ever more clearly that C should not be the primary language for big userland applications.)
Don’t Post The Evidence Unless It Supports Your Case
Yes, but you work with what you have, and we have many a broken segmented community. This is just making the bulletin board virtual and helping out with the legwork.
Doesn't it seem possible that Myth Busters find Myths that are possible (if not easy) to bust because it makes better TV?

I'd be surprised if they thought this was really a challenge unless maybe their researchers had never heard of Google.
Users Vs. You

Users win.

This is a horrible idea. The point of systems like Akismet, etc is to avoid doing horrible solutions like this which penalise users. His apology to IE6 users obviously means nothing to them, because they can't read it!
programmer (EA)
"a line of work were the results are easy to measure and compare, the requirements of skill are modest and the difference between the highest and lowest performer small."

A 'routinized job' if you will.
"Let me help Mr. Arrington with disclosure.

Marc Andreessen co-founder of Ning is on the panel of experts for his upcoming TechCrunch conference.
http://www.techcrunch50.com/2008/panel-of-experts/

C’mon, Mike you need to disclose this is you are going to bash WL.
"

Ouch. The comments war that came after Arrington's little fit is kinda interesting.
Software Engineer at an early-stage startup in the Bay area. I was hired to do Python, but they want me to eventually learn C (which I am really looking forward to).
Very nice, but I would not rebuild libapache2-mod-php5.

Instead use equivs to create a package that depends on apache2-mpm-peruser and provides apache2-mpm-itk.
Ask YC: How important is it that your investors are into what you're doing?
We're just starting to deal with our first couple of VCs / seed investors. There's quite a bit of contrast between the investors and investors' analysts that we've talked to. Some are very excited about our technology; some seem to focus mostly on "pure" business.

As a technology-centric early stage startup, how important is it that investors really identify with your pain points? On one side there's Guy Kawasaki's "all money is green", on the other hand, it seems like at an early stage that having investors that will go out and evangelize for you to their network could be essential.

I'm interested in experiences that others have had here.
Erlang: strings
If anyone wants to play with an open source todo list, I decided that that was just too crowded a space to make money at, so I GPL'ed this:

http://stufftodo.dedasys.com

I still use it when doing consulting, so it does what I want, which is creating an ordered list of things, and keeping track of time spent on them. Indeed, this weekend I've been working on a system tray program that will make that process even easier...
A friendly reminder from the YC guidelines:

"Please don't submit so many links at once that the new page is dominated by your submissions. "
Erlang: strings, pt 2
money quote:
===================
Erlang is probably not the best choice if you need to deal with multiple character encodings, or ...support UTF.
actually only a couple chapters, right now

http://patricklogan.blogspot.com/2008/08/concurrent-programm...
My intention was to mislead everybody my intention was never to mislead anybody my intention was to mislead everybody my intention was never to mislead anybody my inte-
During my last year of high school, I remember asking the college guidance counselors if there were other alternatives to going to college.

They told me my only other choice was to join the military.

Clearly something needs to change.
I think you misunderstand what artificial scarcity means (or I do somehow). 37signals is proof that artificial scarcity must exist in some form to profit. Adding a price to something creates a form of artificial scarcity. From my perspective, you just agreed with me.
Yeah, thanks for the reminder.

That page was put up a while ago. Comments = email; that site is just plain old static HTML + 6 lines of awk to shove in the stuff that gets duplicated across pages (navbars, etc). I can't be arsed to do more. I'll be replacing the -'s later on today, I think. (It's a pity. I never liked the programmable bash completion all that much; I really preferred git-blah.)

edit: fixed the deprecated git-foo commands
OCaml's C FFI
There is no ground level - it's turtles all the way down.
FP newb traps: func calls, Bindings are not variables;
Unmae, dmesg, ps, ... for Xen, QEMU , KVM VM's
Felix Dennis: ex-addict, poet - and murderer?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/apr/03/pressandpublishi...
That's what you would do?

Is that what you actually do? Presumably you have had (or could have borrowed) $300 in capital at some point in your life...
Software developer for large (5 - 7 billion USD) non-tech manufacturing company. Currently investigating the local startup / small company scene for an upgrade, though.
The quality of the quotes goes way up for Drexel and Harvey Mudd -- I wonder if some alumni on the Radar staff couldn't resist a little articulate bashing of their alma mater.
Heh, I read the URL as "you swear tech". Just a heads up ;).
So you moved on to multiple things?
A book by John Taylor Gatto explains the origin of [modern] school. Briefly: during the industrial revolution in the 1800s, industrial owners realized children were "wasting" their time playing around. If instead they could be pre-trained to be better workers ... so they designed modern school and institutionalized it.
With half of College Avenue getting rich off cocaine, yeah, they had this coming. The 17% four-year graduation rate is impressive, too.

I also remember Chico getting epic on Halloween, until the police cracked down on it a few years ago.
No, the implication was that the whole point of doing this was to get as much output as possible while paying minimum wage.

That was the whole premise - the whole thing about tuning the piece rate - it was to make sure each person earned minimum wage, and no more, but also not less, because otherwise they are paying extra (to make up the difference), without getting more fruit.
Joe Biden's pro-RIAA, pro-FBI tech voting record
Social & CommunicationFirefox Add-ons
Startupper and drawer of unemployment. Corporate parents shut the startup they bought down, consolidating their location, resulting in a lil' severance + 6-month paid vacation windfall for me.
Amen to the "don't outsource UI" concept. However, I'd disagree with the common misconception that you can sprinkle magical UI dust once the project is largely done.

For most projects, I think you need a user-experience designer/advocate on the team from day 1... Which, incidentally, is when the best UI guys are looking for jobs-- the idea of coming in and playing design/UX cleanup on an existing app is a helluva lot less fun than being involved from the get-go.
Yes, that's what I do. I make money by writing and selling software, it's not sexy, it's not a million bucks, but it grows. There are LOTS and LOTS of other software makers and sellers just like me.

My new startup is also in the same area, it's what I know.
Download Knight Rider Episodes
Imagine all the latest TV shows right in front of you? Imagine how much time and money you could save if you knew how to Download Knight Rider Episodes almost for free? No more paying $40 for every TV show season because you can actually download high quality TV shows and movies for free.
Download Ghost Whisperer Episodes
Imagine all the latest TV shows right in front of you? Imagine how much time and money you could save if you knew how to Download Ghost Whisperer Episodes almost for free? No more paying $40 for every TV show season because you can actually download high quality TV shows and movies for free.
Download Ugly Betty Episodes
Imagine all the latest TV shows right in front of you? Imagine how much time and money you could save if you knew how to Download Ugly Betty Episodes almost for free? No more paying $40 for every TV show season because you can actually download high quality TV shows and movies for free.
software test technician
Also be careful about side effects. In my town the city tried a neat rule for garbage men: finish your route and you can go home, but we'll pay you the full-time wage. This had two results:

1) garbage routes were completed more quickly
2) on-job injuries (pulled backs and hernias) went way up
HAML: kinda looks like python, if you stand far enough back from the monitor

Python's got dozens of ORMs, templating libs, web frameworks, unit test libs. The embarassment of riches definitely an issue, you could spend a week reading about python ORMs alone.
He also links in the article to a list of free computer science books http://www.coderholic.com/free-computer-science-books/
Everyone does it. Most people ignore evidence that doesn't meet their preconceptions.
I heard from a non-Mormon who went to BYU and said the intolerance there was so awful, that students would walk up to you and ask, "Are you a Mormon?" and if you said no, they would just walk away like you didn't even exist.
Not speaking from experience but I would go with the guys who are excited about your product. You can always tell when people are sincere about their excitement and when they are faking it to push something.
A pretty horrible list with maybe a few bright spots (mint, freerice).

The list really shows how heavy the style/shopping environment is. Not sure if this actually reflects the popularity of this space, or just that there are too many start-ups?
Alan Kay on 'The Camel has Two Humps'
Well, all things being equal, sure. I guess to refine my question a bit, compared to the terms offered or doing a joint vs. solo round, etc. I'm curious how big the role of the VCs being interested in things ends up being.

While we've been fortunate enough to have VCs approach us, they're still not exactly pelting us with term sheets, so it's more trying to see where it's best to concentrate our efforts.
I know the history of the system in my current job, because there are people from its inception over 12 years ago. They've told me about how subsystems have been rewritten. I've also witnessed it in my 3 years there. It's not always pretty. I've seen one subsystem rewritten 3 times by 3 different people who each thought they were smarter than the last guy, but then went on to make the same (very subtle, very difficult to understand) mistakes. The 4th time has stuck, however. The resulting code is much cleaner and is finally (relatively) trouble free. Its approach is significantly different from the last 3 attempts. Figure that!

I've also seen subsystems evolved in 2 or 3 iterations by the same developer, each iteration involving a rewrite.

So, I'd have to say my current shop is pretty good. They really should be doing more refactoring. They could be doing more incremental improvement and avoid the pain of complete rewrites. But at least they are wise enough to avoid pounding their heads against the wall of bad design indefinitely. (Or, to be fair, naive 1st drafts.)
Twitter begins bringing down the spam hammer
If you don't mind a regex-heavy approach, here's a single-method version in Ruby that handles precedence correctly and maintains the ability to pass in operators:

def in_to_pre_fix(expr, opers=%w(*/ +-))
subex = "\\s*(?:(?:<([^>]+)>)|([\\w]+))\\s*"
while expr !~ /^<[^>]*>$/ and expr.sub!(/(?:^|\()([^)(]*)(?:\)|$)/) { | m |
opers.each { | oper |
while m.sub!(Regexp.new("#{subex}([#{Regexp.quote(oper)}])#{subex}"),
'<\3 \1\2 \4\5>'); end }
m.tr_s("() "," ").strip() }; end
expr.delete("<>")
end

(I'm new to Ruby, so it may not be idiomatic or preferred whitespace-style.)
those are the obvious ones yes. the ones that affect people most strongly are the ones we don't think about. You probably picked those because they all seem somewhat unwholesome. It gets more interesting if you take a step back and look at what you do consider wholesome.
Apart from instant signup, why would anyone use this instead of, say, Ta-Da List? It's much harder to create a new item in your lists (I have to find and target the top right side of the screen) than in Ta-Da.
I think the sales analogy works - a good salesman will always have people paying for his products, even if they're garbage. Having an awesome product will make things a lot easier, but the presentation is a huge factor as well.

How long can you scrape by without funding? The longer you wait, the more leverage you'll have, especially if you have a high quality product.

Sam Altman does a great job explaining the funding process:

http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/sam-altman-at-startup...
Everything on the site also seems to be cross-site scriptable, so watch out who's tasks you view; there's a Rails default that filters tags from output by default, which he should be using.
I don't see what the author has against the book Jews Without Money. It's one of the most important pieces of American literature.
I accepted that what I was doing was no longer making me happy, so I started trying other things.

I notified all of my customers (including a couple of long-term contract customers) that I was leaving the business, and spent a year or so tinkering with other projects that I'd started while running the old company. I knew I had several support contracts still outstanding, so I couldn't do anything serious for another year, anywa...so I spent the time tinkering and thinking about what I would really love working on.

One of them was Virtualmin, and after some thought, I realized it was the thing I enjoyed most--I'd been doing it pretty much entirely for fun, and the only thing preventing me from calling it a business was an assumption that the market was already saturated with products in that space. Turns out I was wrong; the other products in the space are bad enough, and the industry is big enough ($20-$40 billion worldwide depending on who you believe, though hosting is a mostly private equity industry, so very few public numbers exist) that following Paul Buchheit's advice of, "add 'done right' to the end of just about anything", works out fine.

During the tinkering phase, I also started building a simple Ruby on Rails app (yet another "disk space on the web" project, along the lines of Dropbox, though I didn't really solve the client-side, or try to...I was thinking DAV was the solution to that), I spent some time doing the math on a content filtering product I'd developed during the life of the old company (also a big industry, but not one I enjoyed), and thought about a number of other ideas. A wiki, a dating site, and a site for getting Open Source project features developed called Ransomware.com (this one probably would have been the winner had it not been Virtualmin--I still own the domain, and may do something with it for fun in a year or two).

Anyway, the important thing is that once I'd settled on Virtualmin as my next business, I dug in with a vengeance. Everything else was forgotten. In fact, I had to think pretty hard to remember what any of the other ideas and projects I tinkered with were when I started writing this reply.
Russians dent Google’s world domination
"Essentially the fact that people from similar age groups are considered equal - have to take the same courses - for the same amount of time - subject to the same exams - and imparted an extremely flawed relative ranking system is all horribly wrong."

More and more I realize "one size fits all" is never true.
Waldorf education
The problem with government is that it will take a policy that was a good idea in the 1800's and continue that policy until the country collapses.
I think you misread the article. The farmowner was happy to pay more than the minimum wage for more-than-minimum productivity.
The URL you requested could not be found.
My state of California, doing America proud.
non-technical at ticketstumbler
Joe Biden's anti-privacy voting record
This seems to be one of those theories that sounds nice, but is in reality just someone's politics creeping into their view of history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_education#History

I personally loathed school, was homeschooled for a year by my mother who was desperate to get me out of a shitty system, and am certainly no fan of said system, but this article and the debate here remind me why I'm not so enthusiastic about non-startup/hacker material: you guys' comments are, so far, on the whole, not terribly insightful on the subject.

I mean, it is a bad system in many ways, but so are other things like democracies and free markets. That doesn't mean they aren't the best that we currently have. Just look at places where people don't have the guarantee of an education, if you want an example of what things could be like. Tons of kids in Africa would love to have the "crappy" education that is on offer in the US or Europe, because it would be the beginnings of a way out of the poverty in which they live.

Can it be improved? Certainly, but "just git the dadburn gummint outta the way" is, to put it mildly, a bit simplistic for something that even folks like Friedman more or less concede is a merit good ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_good ).

It's easy to point out the (many) flaws in the current system, which probably wasn't that pleasant for many of us here. More difficult is coming up with something that could take its place, provide an educated populace, and best allocate people to the educational paths that would serve them best, and of course does all this in a way that is reasonably cost effective, all with a "clientèle" that may very well be quite immature in terms of making important decisions. This is no easy task.
The real scarcity is your time and reputation, which in the right combination can command a significant amount of money. Attempting to limit what can not be limited is creating scarcity where there is none, and it is only a matter of time until someone breaks your business model by figuring out that you've been attempting to control the uncontrollable. And that'll happen just at the point when you're dependent on it and unable to change. For a case study, see the RIAA.
I'm not sure Harvey Mudd really deserves to be on that list, though.
A complementary view on the topic:

http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/less_as_a_competitive...

Less Money Times have changed. All other people’s money gets you these days is into debt. And that’s not a great place to start anything from. You don’t need money for hardware — hardware is cheap. You don’t need money for software — software is free. You don’t need money for marketing — there are a variety of ways get your message out online to a huge audience for next to free. Money doesn’t buy you time and money doesn’t buy you passion (and passion is something you need a boatload of). All money buys you are salaries. And salaries buy you people.
Is there a startup opportunity for a service that takes applications and places students in apprenticeships, internships and specialized training in fields they show aptitude in? Like a headhunter for high school kids. Companies pay a finders fee to the startup, the startup team is responsible for only passing along great candidates.

I'm a former Ivy League admissions officer. I could see a few people from that world wanting to be a part of something like that. I read 2000 applications while I was there and many, many of those kids could have benefited from an alternative route...there just wasn't one.
Contract java monkey. Currently doing VoD. Would rather be working on erlang/python/openlaszlo web fun for my kids. Educational software is uniformly poor in this country.
Artificial scarcity is trying to limit access to something which can not be limited. Once bits, for any purpose, are put in the right order to do something or represent something, the cost to replicate those bits to other parties is zero. In contrast with an automobile, even after it is designed, significant infrastructure (currently) needs to be built and exist to create another one. What you are paying for when you purchase a car is the PROCESS that went into creating JUST that ONE car you bought. Additional cars would not exist if the infrastructure didn't exist to create more of them (and then economies of scale come into play, making the car actually affordable). Bits do not have that limitation.

Scarcity and want must exist in order to set a legitimate price. Artificial scarcity sets a price on something that isn't actually scarce. It is a (unfortunate?) side-effect of the market that potential buyers think that because something has a price, it must be worth having (ie scarce). I don't think there's actually anything wrong with basing a business on this, but don't be surprised when your customers realize you've been selling them something that should have a price closer to zero because there is infinite supply.
Jaiku seems to be running now on Google App Engine
True. Please note: "modern school": a tax-sponsored child care system that free parents for work, and ensures minimal literacy and composed conduct in public.
Annals of the Patently Absurd
Maatkit: a toolkit of utilities and tools for MySQL
Shard Lessons