skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're using the same values in 100 different places in a stylesheet you're frankly using them wrong. There's actually a decent point there - adding variables will undoubtedly encourage that sort of thinking and create further constant abuse rather than encouraging people to use the cascade and inheritance.

That said, I'm not sure if that potential problem alone justifies its lack of introduction - there are legitimate use cases as well where they will improve clarity, the ability to provide complex CSS as boilerplate and get people to change the constants to suit their needs would be useful (e.g. easy recycling of complex column code) and I think their argument about code reuse is pretty much nonsense too.
I do. Got to add flagging capabilities and a few other things.
Can't send SMS with the iPhone SDK, so his auto-detection and fallback to use SMS will not work.
For my very first attempt at online success, I spent the entirety of my 8 weeks of Easter holidays back in 2000 working my nuts off on a prototype that ended up not bringing one penny of return and was blasted out in just one presentation (though I learnt some powerful lessons in the process of failing miserably).

Seriously man, grow some skin. Wtf? "I feel incredibly sad that I wasted a few hours doing something that I can't see any value in, in hindsight"? I mean come on.

I'm really not trying to be overly harsh, but if you can't take the emotional turmoil of wasting a few hours on a harebrained idea, then you might want to bury yourself in a coffin filled with cotton, because this world is too harsh for you. Life is full of defeats and failures - and that's when everything goes well. A life without setbacks would be as bland and boring as an over-boiled cabbage leaf.

Have any other hackers ever spent time on something they genuinely wanted to create, only to feel completely empty after they actually create it?

If you've not done that a 100 million times, you really shouldn't call yourself a "hacker" - or even a "man", for that matter.

PS: Otoh, if you have a tendency to go through very deep/high ups and downs with no apparent relationship with reality, you might want to get yourself checked for bipolar disorder.

PPS: Oh, and btw, it's dilemma.
Have you seen getabstract.com? They are pretty successful from what I've heard, but their model is different from yours.
I write lots of stupid little projects that rarely get used, but by writing them I'm improving my skills and learning new things, so they're not a complete loss.

Plus I enjoy writing software. Sometimes it's more about the journey than the destination, blah blah blah...
Yeah, I've seen most of the other sites doing similar things. My idea was to try and 'fly under the radar' by having something that's probably not as high quality, but far more open. Hopefully this would facilitate discussions of the book in question, which is something I think that could be just as educational as the summaries themselves, even high quality ones.
Generate quantity. Fail. Learn. Rinse. Repeat. The quality will appear. Success (and money) follows thereafter. Rate of return usually wholly dependent on the value to users generated. Don’t worry about wasting a few hours/days as long as you make progress. Most important lesson, keep moving forward, keep going, even if slowly.
Another Google Exec Departs To Run Another Social Network: Kimber To Friendster
In an interesting side note, this class is taught by the Berkeley open computing facility (OCF) that Hans Reiser co-founded.
Javascript: Stop Fighting It
Technically, I didn't give away how to do the standard deviation ;)
Dr Robert Zubrin has long been an advocate of setting up a fully automated rocket fuel factory on Mars prior to a human landing there. This should strengthen his position.
I had a semi-nightmare where a murderer holds a gun to my head asking me to solve a traveling salesman problem with 100 nodes on a graph. In the end, I find a way to do it in O(nlogn) time and he gives me the millenium prize. I woke up in a cold sweat and scribbled on paper for hours trying to remember the algorithm. Now it's nothing but a depressing memory in what could've been the best dream of my life.
it sucks.. i wont do this kind of torture to my users...
This is the kind of helpful feedback I was banking on. Thanks much.

Originally there was no recommendation system planned, but once I realized how easy it would be I had some infatuation-based feature creep. Going back to the drawing board with 'don't tell them, show them' as priority 1.
The authors definition of a startup is looser than yours. He is clearly including his example lawyer from the article as one of those 80%.

Also I don't think the 930k number includes people who have significantly more than 5 million. There are about 300 million citizens in the US 1% of that is 3 million not 930k.

A lot of people like Doctors that make 500,000 a year spend most of that money as they go. hence I would bet a lot of them never make it to the 5 million mark.
> ... Takes an Open Mind

... or massive inflation.
AT&T to Be Provider Of 'Cloud Computing'
Right now, you are here on HN :)
I think I know what you're talking about. It actually sounds like an aspect of depression. Have you asked yourself if anything else is happening in your life that might contribute to your feeling sad? Are you in basically OK shape physically - getting some exercise, some sleep, some nutrition?

The other thing is positive thinking. I don't mean "happy" thinking; I mean positive in the sense of foreground vs. background. Foreground is something that can help you get where you want to go; background is something you don't have that would have helped you. When building something, you attach things to what you've already got - not try to attach things to space! Trees grow this way; crystals do too. And lots of people talk about building or growing software.

There's a framing issue too: I find it really helpful to compare what I have now compared with what I had before (to highlight the fact that I've had some impact). This is to counteract the frame of comparing what I've done with something that was better, was perfect.

Funny thing is, when I approach things in this "positive" way, I feel a lot more encouraged and inspired. Exciting ideas come to me from nowhere, and I have lots of energy. So, even though it seems like a fun, easy way, it results in much higher productivity. For me, anyway.

PS: there's a school of thought that depression is caused by formal reasoning errors ("cognitive distortions"). As a form of mind-hacking. I find it extremely fascinating: http://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-Therapy-Revised-Updated/d...
Compliance in the Cloud
I took a step back and immediately saw absolutely no redeeming value of what I had just done, and this made me feel incredibly sad.

I would rephrase that as, "...absolutely no redemming value at this time..."

You have just planted seeds. Of course you can see no "redemming value" right now. If you just planted seeds in your garden out back, you wouldn't see any results there either, today.

But just as the seeds in your garden will deliver results in a few months (provided you care for them), the seeds you just planted in your little "hairbrained" project, will also reap dividends. You just don't know when or what.

Sometime in the future when you least expect it, the lightbulb will go on and you'll figure out a cool solution to some other problem. What you don't know now (and probably won't even realize then) was that what you did today stirred a few neurons to enable that light bulb to go on in the future.

As hackers, everything we do is either planting seeds or reaping harvest. If you didn't see a harvest today, that's because you were planting seeds. Just keep on working and trust the process; that's how we all get better at what we do.
Can you spot some?
Gaming With Heart
I love that there are loads of error messages from the installer in the window behind the wizard. That is a serious lack of professionalism from the developers. In fact, that a HOWTO is needed to install an end-user application at all represents a radical disconnect in thinking.
Growth for FlashcardDB was slow and steady for the first few months, but found some real traction this past month for some reason (July). It is getting about 40-50 new users per day and just passed five thousand card sets, 3500 users and just under a quarter million flashcards.

The most recent change was adding support for the Supermemo/Mnemosyne-style Spaced Repetition algorithm:

http://flashcarddb.com/graded

http://flashcarddb.com/blog/8-feeds-font-sizes-and-a-new-srs

Since using the Leitner System is also an option, I hope to have a real set of data eventually to compare whether or not one algorithm is truly "more efficient" than the other.
IPhone App Store Sales Figures & Some Thoughts
The thing that will really limit the potential of MobileMe is that the email address is not free. No one wants to sign-up for an email address that will go away if they ever decide to stop using the rest of the service. And, no one wants to pay full price for something if they're not going to use all the features. Make the email free (me.com is a pretty cool email) and people will start to whip out their annual Benjamins for the rest of the service!

Maybe Eddy Cue, the new head of MobileMe, reads HN. If so, you're welcome.
I usually feel elation at having made something beautiful. Whether it is actually beautiful is debatable, but I think it is, and that buzz keeps me going.

I get sad when I make a toy and no one plays with it. Is that what you're feeling? I added some ideas to it. It's not a bad concept--just a limited, single-serving app.
Thanks, I was wondering the same thing myself.
Should you ignore the n00bs?
I posted RateMyStudentRental here a week ago (even though we actually launched to our school about 6 months ago), and the feedback was great. Of course posting here didn't really lead to repeat users, since our site is aimed primarily at students, but it was nonetheless encouraging. Since last week, we've launched a redesign and continue to chug along.
Top 10 : Sk8prK - The Best Skateboarding Community
On Our Project, We're Always 90% Done
Distressed Markets in Las Vegas, Elsewhere
With the real estate market around the country sinking into a downward spiral it seems that no state or city is immune. Property values are down and the number of foreclosures is up. Huge banks are scrambling to cover themselves with a great number of properties that are no longer being paid for and everyone is suffering because of it. Short sales (A short sal
Yeah, some of the old School House Rock videos seem rather fictional to me these days (particularly "No More Kings"). I'd love to see a modern remix of that with some well chosen TV footage on YouTube.
The Bush administration, specifically.
It was also posted 8 months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=77118
When I used FreeBSD I had a lot of lag when pages had transparency, probably because Xorg wasn't accelerated.
Yep sure.

For example, "3,000 pentamillionaires to discuss their path to success. Perhaps not surprisingly, none of them had a cushy union job down at the DMV. The vast majority — 80% — either started their own business or worked for a small company that saw explosive growth. And almost all of them made their fortune in a big lump sum after many years of effort."

I'm sure Nasim would have laughed at this. Firstly, selecting a group of successful people and asking what made them successful makes u fall into a trap of believing that these factors led them to success and hence whoever adopts these factors will be as successful as them. Secondly, for each millionaire there would be many other normal people who did what the millionaire did but didn't see their bank account swelling. For a study to be insightful, the participants should have as many losers (if not more) as winners.

Moreover, article confuses correlation with causality.

The article is like: Google, Yahoo, Amazon, etc. have one thing in common: Silicon Valley hence being in Silicon Valley will get you to that status. Tell me how many startups actually become Google-like?
Top 50 Global Tech Stocks
Hilarious! Of course the real issue is that with a multiple-choice answer, a bot doesn't even have to work the puzzle.
If you're not familiar with Goodwill, it is used to account for amounts paid over and above the book value of what was purchased. So if Coke bought Pepsi for 300 million, and Pepsi had a book value of 100 million in Pepsi's internal accounting, Coke would show 200 million in goodwill on it's books, IIRC.
Hmm I am not sure about this one.

With 2 couples it goes:

Both women know that the other man has cheated but they don't know if their own has.
So when the queen says one has cheated at first they don't kill their husbands becuase it could be the other one.
But if the other woman didn't know the others man had cheated the cheater had to be their own but since she didn't she must know the other has cheated.
So they will both kill their husband after figuring that out.

But i am not sure this is the same for 3 and more couples.
Can they make the same deduction? If the queen said that 99 other men had cheated, yes, but 1? I don't see it.
Pretty amazing to get $15m for a site not even out of beta...

I don't see the point of Rupture. A social network for gamers, linking their real life identities to their game identities and keeping all their friends up to do date on their latest achievements in game? (I'm not sure whether most gamers want to link their RL identities closely to their game identities; imagine applying for a job and having a Rupture profile come up in the top 10 google hits on your name...)

It seems vulnerable to being muscled out by improved networking within games; witness the example of Rupture itself, where its first beta implemented extensive integration with Blizzard's World of Warcraft, including creating profiles of players' equipment. Then Blizzard launched its own Armory, forcing Rupture to reconsider, leading to the design we see today, where Rupture serves as a "gaming aggregator and friend network," collecting Xbox Live feeds and Armory profiles, keeping track of changes, and alerting your friends.

All that said, congratulations to Mr. Fanning on the sale.
I use mibbit as my irc client now. Great service.

Have you thought about charging money for an account that can handle irc File transfers? Like allow dcc file transfers to your server, then I can log in and pick up all of the files I have dl'ed from anywhere

Might be some legal implications wrt illegal file sharing though.
We don't understand how humans "understand" chess, either.

From what I've read, the latest research seems to indicate top chess players train their brain's facial recognition system to recognize tactical board positions. But it's not clear how a grandmaster finds the right move, especially considering simultaneous games where a GM plays on 20 or 30 boards at once against club players, often winning all of the games while only spending a few seconds, if that, on each move.
GreasePocket: More grease on your iPhone
Friendster raises $20 mm for Asia strategy and patent claims
But if they can talk to each other about it they would have killed all the man before the queen came.
cucugneo
101 Unconventional Sources for Entrepreneurial Funding
I want to find a co-founder using only my iPhone.
Incredible ent web app startup looking for developer co-founder. Want to find him / her only using my iPhone.

See savestaff.blogspot.com for details!
Being 25-30 I have yet to see this trend :( and don’t see many of the people I know with partners more than ±4yrs their age.

Moving may solve the problems related to geography, but perhaps not those of culture and lifestyle which often form a larger part of the problem people face. As addressed by others, going to another country may not help any more than simply going to a larger more cosmopolitan city. But even in big cities (London, Paris, New York etc.) it is still possible to be single/lonely, as many are. I think only big changes in lifestyle really solve much of the dilemma such people face.

Lastly, as we get older, we all start to look at people more as future partners even from the outset. This becomes harder as, using nature as an example, it is probably fair to say that the most desirable mates are taken early. Hence those that leave things until later e.g. to focus on career etc., often find things harder and (I dare say) have to settle for less or compromise more. This seems especially true for women who feel their biological clock is ticking and develop the nesting instincts. I suspect this is one of the reasons that in a generally declining/competitive online dating market the sites focused towards marriage in the niches e.g. Jewish/Muslim/Christian matrimonial sites, do well compared to the rest.

Anyway, I am building a dating site to address some of the problems I see and welcome comments/suggestions/ideas of others (your experiences, what you see is broken, solutions). You can contact me at babulmiah{.a.t.]yahoo<,d,o,t,)com. Hopefully, I’ll launch an alpha for HN review soon.
Thank you.

By the way, I think Mark Twain had it slightly wrong. He should have said "shameless" instead of "an idiot".
Germany's most important web founders.
The Ten Commandments for Business Failure from the Man who Gave the World New Coke
It's in German, but the list is pretty easy to read. From a recent panel on Deutsche Startups.
I prefer their WAP site (mobile.nytimes.com) to the iPhone app. The website loads faster due to the emphasis on text over images, and you can scroll past the adds. The app requires too much bandwidth and the ad placement is persistent and annoying.
8 weeks? Try 8 months of feverish work and in the end, nothing came from it. Sure, I know now that it probably was a wasted effort as a product, but as a learning experience, it was invaluable. Failure is a part of life. You're right. You have to get over it and keep producing. Seriously, man up
First off, I don't mean this to sound snide towards the original poster.

If you could use search, you could easily see all of the "there's no search, use http://searchyc.com or google for site:news.ycombinator.com" comments. It's a question that keeps returning...because there's no search on the main page. And it's not in the FAQ, despite being a rather frequently asked question. (Nor is it in the little help link next to this window.)

Perhaps there could be a button that says "Search" and links to searchyc.com.
LOL! In the real world no-one cares about Slashdot "news". Stuff that matters indeed. Yes it matters a lot to the tiny demographic of self-proclaimed "Linux nerds" but to 99.99% of the population it's utterly irrelevant.
"750 MLB players + 460 NBA Players + 1700 NFL players = 2910. Let's multiply that by the past 10 years = 29,000 current or former pro sports players who are pentamillionaires"

It is not that completely different players play each season. I don't have any numbers but I would say that 10% new players each year seems more likely.

Also, I don't know exact salaries but I would say that it is winner takes it all. Most players don't have so huge payoff.

"There are about 700,000 doctors in the USA. 15% of those doctors are surgeons and anesthetists, specialties where you can make $500K/yr. So, 105,000 pentamillionaire doctors..."

You don't know their savings habits. If you make such money and have guarantee of similar earnings in the future, it is hard to resist spending more.

EDIT: The problem with entertainment sector is that some of them actually have huge salaries, but they are also forced to spend a lot of money. If you're a celebrity, you're forced by society to rent a jet, wear Dior, own a mansion etc.
Oh, I've done the 8 months failure thing too, I was just referring to my first attempt...
The chart you link to shows C, Java and Perl going down, but it also shows Lisp going down a lot and Scheme going up only a little.
I previewed Microspaces 'Nested GUI' technology on HN (http://www.nestedguis.com)... and based on the feedback made a few changes. I haven't launched the sites I've built on top of it yet. but very soon.
That design rocks. Curious, how did you get in touch with a Russian company, and how was it working with them?
Why must all web apps have kewl spelling nowadays? How long before it's fashionable to put back the "E"?
A Bunch of Great Strategies for Using Memcached and MySQL Better Together
Two-dimensional zip
you mean invest in thin air
Try and buy the domain with the "e" and see how much it sets you back. The e is not coming back until the domain name system changes such that .com is not assumed, so maybe with the new domain extensions, or just as likely, never.
Beware of Twitter Virus
but...why? seems like it would be more of an inconvenience than anything to restrict yourself to only using iphone.
I think I was looking through a flickr group of 'great web design' or something similar (e.g. http://flickr.com/groups/webdesign-inspiration/) and found their site mentioned on it. We got in touch, and it went from there.

We found it a pleasure to work with them. I should point out that it wasn't a case of cost - there wasn't that much difference between them and companies based in the UK/US - the choice was purely down to their creativity.

We communicated throughout the project via Basecamp, and found they very quickly got 'what we meant' when we asked for changes or things to be done in certain ways. We've worked with tens of design agencies over the last 10 years (mostly face-to-face), and turbomilk were probably one of the easiest we've worked with! It helps that they seem to be nice guys too, who genuinely love design. I think you get a sense of that from their website.
A large group of like-minded people constantly conversing is also a recipe for groupthink. Yes, the Bay area is the home of most the tech startups. And curiously they all look and feel the same, imitating each other in an innumerable number of ways.
Not that I've heard, and it'd be easy to mistake the current options on the iPhone for that. They haven't launched the push service yet (they claim September so let's say January) and right now the phone has an option under "fetch new data" to poll every 15 minutes.
5M is a good retirement but it's not rich. When your assets are passively generating 5M a year then your rich.
here's a better question -- have you ever had dreams that were purely text? like, no dreams of you looking at a screen or anything, the dream itself was purely in text. all ideas and everything that was happening is conveyed in code or plaintext.

i've had quite a few. always weirds me out a bit.
The point of New Coke was to erase the taste of Coke from the memory of the consumer. What we have now is not Old Coke but in fact New New Coke - similar to the original but made with cheaper sugar.
Sarah Lacy’s Once You’re Lucky: Money doesn’t change everything
Maybe the whole thing needs to be free. Break Apple's make a profit on everything policy. In this case, these are the types of features people will use because they're there and get used to having. The they get hooked.

Apple could get their own social network out of it. And they're going for a few rubles these days.
Awesome app. This is the best web based IRC client that I've seen so far.
In my understanding an MBA isn't considered much of a qualification in finance, banking or trading. Quants have quantitative degrees, while traders... well, they just seem to be some kind of trained gorilla as far as I can figure out.
Web app is focussed on managing small business anytime, anywhere. This is an experiment in present technology's ability to not only do a startup, but manage it longer term from a mobile device. I want to walk the walk.

Looking for a co-founder who is equally interested in innovative mobile small business web apps.
I had that problem too, I assumed it was my computer's fault. Anybody know what the page is doing that makes scrolling suffer so badly? Is it just the transparency like pistoriusp mentioned? It was bad on Firefox 2 on Gentoo; it seems to be fine on Firefox 3 on Windows XP