skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask NickB: How did you get 19 thousands Karma Points?
How did you get 19,000 Karma Points?
Principally by making lots of interesting submissions. From http://searchyc.com/user/nickb :

941 comments, 2.97 points per comment

3514 submissions, 6.00 points per submission
Somewhere there is a lawyer board where right now posters are asking "So If I wanted to form a startup for legal advice, is there some kind of web thingy I might need for that?"
Microsoft innovation in browser privacy space
Hey, it's the holistic answer to the "how to". What, should I have broken it down into 12 steps?

To sum it up: let him solve problems his own way. Let him develop tools/abstractions that help him hide the sort of details and menial tasks that sap his strength. Force him to get up and go exercise or relax. Don't hold a nebulous infinishable to-do list over his head to guilt trip him-- he will come down off of his creative high and beat himself up for being irresonsible and may even shut down emotionally. Allow him to relate to people one at a time-- a hike with only one of the children, dates and activities without a big crowd. Don't take it personally when he absolutely dreads doing activities you think are "fun". Go stand by his desk until he gets that nagging little task done. Tell him things like, "if you don't get anything else done today, please look into x; it's really important to me." And no, he doesn't need all of a June Cleaver, a secretary, and a personal accountant-- he does need someone to play the part of a "coach", though. And someone that can organize some of the pesky details into something he can act on can be critical to this guy getting anything done.
100 Best RSS Feeds for Job Seekers
You’ll get the latest updates right to your RSS reader without having to visit each individual site, streamlining your searching process and leaving you with more time for other important tasks. Here are a few feeds that you should read.
When leaving your family for 3 months isn't worth it.
I think that twitter itself may not be that big but attaching twitterlike 'tags' to things may be a very useful feature. Being able to "home" your comments on specific sections of a text seems useful.
any more invite codes?
He loves direct answers to simple questions.

Thank you.

(He also easily grasps difficult obscure concepts while missing the obvious if a subtle shift in perception is needed.)
Let me guess - garbage collection? ;)
Yes, have read it and disagree. The act of syncing (sharing, backup, versioning, access) has to be super easy to use (i.e. tied to the OS). The problem with syncing apps in the past was they were hard to use so people stuck with their USB drives, emailing themselves, etc. Dropbox comes to mind as a syncing app that has made it easy to use.

Similarly, mp3 players weren't killer products until iPod came along :)
But how do you make 3514 submissions + 941 comments. That is as if you spend 8 hours a day on YC.
Yup. Everything shoved into the dictionary named Smalltalk, including "isA" methods for every subsystem you've written shoved up to Object isn't a big deal for in-house development. When you publish a library or grab one from somewhere, then it becomes a big problem. Then you want namespaces.

So the real-world experience for Smalltalk is that the former is mostly FUD. The latter is a real issue. I suspect that this pretty much applies to the other dynamic languages as well.
Our core focus will be businesses that want to control their own storage.

Is entering your S3 secret ID and key too cumbersome for most customers?
> coerced, convinced--or without mainstream alternatives:

"Starting in 2006, many new laptop computers have been sold with a Trusted Platform Module chip built-in... Intel is planning to integrate the TPM capabilities into the southbridge chipset in 2008..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module

Or simply unaware, and with little chance of ever finding out:

http://isis.poly.edu/csaw/embedded (and assorted talks at HOPE, Defcon, Shmoocon, etc. on hardware and firmware covert channels)
I look forward to watching it turn into the 4chan wiki.
Is it me or are some songs very difficult in easy mode? ;)
I also think that there are some bugs in the key response. Or: I just suck at playing it. However, great idea and good luck!
Don't hold a nebulous infinishable to-do list over his head to guilt trip him-- he will come down off of his creative high and beat himself up for being irresonsible and may even shut down emotionally.

Wow, I didn't even notice this one the first read. It's EXACTLY what I'm going through right now.

It's a test of wills. I'm in the middle of a huge rewrite of a critical app while they insist on bombarding me with minutia (digital whining) every single day. For the first time ever (with them), I refuse. "Live with it until after Labor Day; I'm busy." Stay tuned...

(Anyone looking for a good programmer?)
I think it's a fantastic idea, proposing open standards for books but there's a major incumbent people aren't looking at: academia still doesn't trust the Internet. Students are often limited to one Internet source and the rest hard copied sources. We on HN know how well open licensing goes on the Internet because we use it everyday, academia uses the Internet for internal email and checking the weather, otherwise it's treading on their territory and they don't like that.

Amazon is pushing a student version of the Kindle out, but just like other tech toys you're starting to see in the classroom, at the most you'll see them used in community colleges and maybe even a few privileged high schools, but the major universities and academies are highly unlikely to jump on the ship and provide DRM free textbooks any time in the near future.
my z just lost its poor engine ;-( The dealer says the oil looked like mercury. driving it out to the valley must have put too much stress on it or something. the current estimated repair bill is $12k. i sure hope i can get the extended warrenty to kick in.
if you can only do one option do the hosted version, you are in an information bubble where most people you know use it, outside the valley most people never heard of it.

+ chances are if a person has an S3 account, they most likely have the knowledge to do what you are doing themselves
Well, that's a personal decision, obviously, but your post didn't say anything about you not applying because you didn't want to be away from your family, just that you didn't think YC would accept you because you have a family.
its part of your story. people like to have something of value. inviting someone else allows them that chance.
Sadly not, we looked into GC stuff but it doesn't seem to be the culprit
This YC comment just cost my company over $200.
I think he automated a script to do interesting submissions and amazing comments ;)
Actually, my priority is to land a job in a startup. Hopefully a consumer web site. I've been burned by the corporation pretty badly so I'm hoping to not go back there again.
The Email Filter That Saved My Inbox
Yeah, we have a special invite for the News.YC community. Go to:

http://jamlegend.com/register/HackerNews and you should be able to sign up.
Improving the calendar: A smarter way to visualize a year
Great feedback. We have a couple bands in the pipe, but we're gonna be opening up the platform so it'll be very easy for any indie band to put their stuff up.
Time for a New Venture Animal: Ymwkcombinator
Can unit testing be a waste?
IPhone MotionX Poker Solver
Something slightly related: YubNub, social command-line for the web

http://yubnub.org/

And also: Firefox keyword searches

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_Tips:_Quick_searches_:_L...
Tennis, Chess and War (and Startups)
Yeah, I think it is too. As technical people its not a big deal for us, but you should make it as easy as possible for people otherwise you'll lose the business to a potentially inferior competitor who makes it nice and easy
I love this analogy.
You didn't read the second-to-last graf of my comment. Even if they can't universally stop copying, and a small number of people can still introduce high-fidelity copies, they can use technology to create deterrents to distributing them.

Two simple examples:

If a license or physical player is needed to create a high-fidelity copy (for instance, by capturing raw video streams from a player), and the output video is watermarked, content providers can revoke the player. Now "free" copies cost players.

If the same technology creates a trail of evidence leading back to "pirate 0", people will start getting sued. Not everyone the RIAA sued was innocent, and there's nothing to say that the DVD legal teams will create the same PR firestorm the RIAA did by abusing the system. Just as importantly, if it takes a huge amount of effort to create a supply chain of unlawful copies, the court case is much more damaging.

Content protection is not really a practice focus for us (though anticheating and kernel protection are), so my thoughts on this are not an exhaustive summary of the space of solutions content providers have. I'm just saying, the content providers aren't always on the wrong side of computer science.
Atari 2600 Combat assembly code fully commented: http://www.atariage.com/2600/archives/combat_asm/index.html

Featuring tricks such as

; Only the first 180 degrees of rotation has been drawn into ROM. In the
; case of the other 180 degrees, this subroutine renders a flipped version
; by doing the following:
Since one of the target market is businesses, I would assume they have at least 1 guy to do that for them (enter S3 key and ID). They aren't going to be part of your market if they don't.
Fixed bids aren't so bad. The trick is learning to do really good estimates. Figure out how much information/requirements you need in order to create an estimate, and get that data first. Document what YOU understand the scope of work to be (separately from the provided requirements) and make that the basis for your fixed bid.

Many customers will prefer a higher priced fixed bid, rather than a lower prices hourly based estimate, because they can budget for it (or get budget for it) without worrying about overruns. Many less scrupulous development firms (or people who just can't estimate very well) end up billing well over the initial estimate when doing hourly invoicing, and many customers have been bitten by that before.

In my experience smaller client will be more likely to go for the hourly approach, due to the initial estimate being lower, and feeling like they have more control over the costs during the course of the project. Larger companies almost always work with fixed size budgets approved on a project by project basis, and so having a fixed cost (even if it's potentially higher) is key for their internal budgeting and resourcing. Plus it protects against the overruns hourly project can bring. I've never seen a Fortune 500 outsource a full development project on an hourly basis. It's almost ALWAYS fixed price, just due to how they handle their own budgets.

The trick, imho, to good fixed price cost estimating is to get the best requirements you can up-front, and restate them yourself in your SOW, broken out by task groupings instead of however the client structured them. Clarify any potentially nebulous requirements/tasks yourself, and let the client know if they want to change the way you've filled in the gaps, they can do so, but you will need to submit an addendum to the invoice for any changes they make (unless otherwise agreed upon - i.e. same effort swaps of un-developed areas). Once you have the overall task list figured out, do your internal task breakdown and estimates. Then, pad your estimates out by perhaps 50% (this depends on how good you are at estimating, and how many times you've done task/feature X before).

If I have a task doing something that I haven't done before (i.e. some sort of crazy-cool ajax front-end wizardry (I'm a back-end guy)), I'll pad that out a bit more, since I'm likely to run into a snag or two along the way. If it's something I've done 100 times before (i.e. user registration/login/logout/forgot password flows), I don't need to pad that, since I can estimate that pretty exactly.

Also, don't worry if your padding seems high, or your SOW price seems too high. The client always has the option of doing an hourly approach instead. It's up to them. The more projects like this you do, the better you'll get at estimating, and it becomes second nature.
Bayesian Networks Without Tears [pdf]
That's assuming the client can tell the difference. Most non-technical clients won't have a clue how long something should take.
User Attention Span, the New Performance Metric
This is a different kind of wrong though... You're talking about morally wrong, while the parent is talking about factually wrong.

Also, though, in reference to the silly pirate example below, something being absolutely wrong does not prevent the possible necessity of doing that thing to prevent greater wrongs. Its still wrong, just possibly less wrong.

So I would agree that eating children is wrong.
Anatomy of Linux dynamic libraries
Consumers don't care about locked-down systems; if they did, the dominant portable MP3 player would run Linux. It doesn't; it's the iPod.

The analog gap isn't an unsolveable CS problem. Yes, you can't encrypt photons. But you can watermark and trace them. Preventing copies is CS-hard. Preventing covert channels is also CS-hard. Watermarks are a defensive application of covert channels.

Watermarks -> revocation -> economic disincentive to copying transactions.

Watermarks -> evidence -> lawsuit -> economic disincentive to copying at all.

Also, none of these things has to work perfectly. The industry's goal isn't to stop copying. It's to capture the maximum amount of revenue per title.
Comcast to set 250 gigabyte monthly cap on Oct. 1?
There's a great article on Billy Mitchell who was the first guy to master the Pac Man kill screen in the July issue of Harpers.

His "reverse engineering" of the game was so detailed that he amazed the original programmers.

http://laweekly.blogs.com/joshuah_bearman/2008/08/finally-th...

Also, be sure to check out the movie "King of Kong" where Billy Mitchell is also a controversial figure.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0923752/
Absolutely true. The advantage is the same regardless of billing model.

I've found you can't compete against off-shore outfits on price if you want to keep making money. So don't even try. Your competitive advantage is quality, communication, and responsibility.

You can deliver high quality product, designed for extension/enhancement in the future, and can communicate clearly with the client, and understand what they want (without them having to create a 50 page requirements document covering every tiny detail), and after the delivery they can call you up, and speak to the same person they talked to before, on the phone, and you'll take personal responsibility and pride in your deliverable. That costs more. End of story.

You won't get every client, but trust me, the ones that just care about the lowest $ figure above all else, aren't the clients you want to have anyway.
Learn everything about a website
NeverBlock with MySQL Support (Ruby)
How many technology companies do you know that pay significant dividends? That just tends not to be how tech companies operate. It's not an artifact of VC investment.
It is good to be the middleman!
And does his employer know? ;)
"Still, with many such sites nowadays, they're just providing search results, not much different than Google..."

Veoh, YouTube, and "such sites" host the videos and aren't search engines. Since the videos in violation would be hosted on their servers rather than merely linked to, they have much different requirements under the DMCA and copyright law than Google.
Guy Crosses Canada on an Electric Bike Using Only $10 of Electricity
Did you just say that the reason C++ and Java are popular is developers don't want to spend clients money writing everything from scratch (in what? assembler? fortran? C?) in the most simplified way possible?

I don't even know where to start with that. Using existing code libraries for common tasks means less development time/cost, higher quality code (the code has been tested by thousands of people over months or years), and easier enhancement/extension in the future (the code already solves for many common enhancements and/or is built in a modular/configurable/etc... manner and so on).

Writing your own "super-awesome-optimized-magic" ORM/Internationalization/Transaction Management/Caching/Encryption/MVC framework/XML parser/etc... is generally a bad idea for you and your client.
FWIW, I'm blown away by the "Fantasy Congress" game (by the same group) - http://www.fantasycongress.com/ . I hadn't heard of it and haven't played it, but the name and the concept are OUTSTANDING! I can't imagine any male, political junkie who would pass on that. In fact, I'm forwarding it to my coworkers right now. I wish you guys luck, I think you're off to a great start!
We Burned the Poop
Some Web sites are designed for older browsers
Perhaps his definition of "success" doesn't involve him feeling embarassed about what he did to his family for a long shot, even if he made it. Note also that regardless of how you and your wife appear to feel about it now, your perspective may change 10 years from now. Mine has. I'm embarassed. Not a good feeling.
To whomever downvoted me: where do you disagree? Or did I mis-read something?
Price Versus Cost
Text and Twitter your way to victory
in the squeejee factsheet pdf one of the projects listed is
WildFire Viral Business Marketing Application
www.sparkwildfire.com

except the url that gets copied into the clipboard on winxp foxit pdf readed is www.sparkwildire.com

I have no idea why.
Wars are generally lost for economic reasons, many of which predate the war. But Tennis and Chess maybe.
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The Yelp Mafia
Watch One Tree Hill Episodes
Imagine if you could download One Tree Hill TV Show and thousands of other ones without paying for every single one of them? You could save thousands of dollars if you knew a better way
The big data dump
I guess I wasn't clear, but that last line was referring to the other sites, the ones "playing dumb" about having tons of illegal stuff on them and doing nothing about it. Generally, many of _those_ sites nowadays are simply search engines (many torrent sites or sites like binsearch, for example), which seems to be how they argue around having to care about copyright issues. Thanks for pointing that out though, better to be clear :)
Widespread adoption won't happen until the open textbooks are significantly better than proprietary ones, both for the students and the teachers. Teachers will happily use them if a) they are better for students and b) don't require additional work on the teacher's part.
Fair enough, and I agree - nothing's for free. For me, the fear that 10 years from now I would regret not taking a chance is greater than the worry that I will feel as you do. It's a personal choice.
SUP will always have more overhead for a single feed, because it requires more than one (conditional) request: you need one for the SUP feed each time it is polled, and one for the content feed whenever it is changed.

Even with 10 feeds, SUP will probably not break even because processing 1 conditional request for the SUP feed is not really less work than processing 10 conditional requests. Each way will have approximately the same network latency (you can process 10 GET requests in one round-trip with pipelining) and the same bandwidth usage (you can stuff a few GET requests and a few 304 Not modified responses in a single packet with pipelining). The same techniques used to efficiently update a SUP feed can be used to keep individual cache entries for each individual feed up to date. Even without pipelining, the benefits are of SUP will be negligible for a site with just a handful of feeds.

The fixed cost of implementing SUP and the variable cost of maintaining it needs to be included in the cost analysis, not just the bandwidth.

SUP and Sixapart's stream will be useful for big sites. But, they are unnecessary for small ones, at least as far as they've been documented so far.
I did not mean to offer a "you are sick" perspective at all. I think some people can sing, some people are extroverted, some people have athletic grace and ability, some people can draw or have other artistic ability. Many people don't like to speak in front of a crowd, in the same way that I would view what would be involved in becoming a cost accountant or stock control clerk. My use of the term ADD was not meant to imply illness, just a convenient shorthand for the way that many folks are.

The books I suggested offer a variety of suggestions for how to manage the downsides to ADD. I suggested them because I have read many and found these useful. I don't view myself as sick or having an inner dolphin (or at least being any more "special" than anyone else that I know).
I get the feeling that YC is based on a different set of values and insights than your typical VC firm is. Just my impression, of course, but I get the feeling that PG is trying out a social "hack".

There's a magical section of life that a lot of people don't take advantage of - the first few years out of college, when your responsibilities and personal needs are very, very low. A lot of people in their early twenties who don't go directly to grad school spend this time as paralegals, programmers for bigCorps, and so forth.

In a way, YC is testing out a perfect hack - showing how a remarkably small amount of money, along with just a bit of encouragement, can completely alter the course of a lifetime - and, if it is successful and spreads as a model, ultimately change the nature of careers and work.

It's not that married founders with kids and a mortgage can't participate, but if "married with kids" describes you (and it certainly describes me), you probably aren't in that state anymore. But it's up to you to decide - I do know a startup founder who is 40 with a wife and little one (his wife works, though, which helps a lot - though in this case, the few grand YC offers would be irrelevant, and he's funded through a more traditional investment approach). I know lots and lots of married programmers with kids who work as early employees of startups. I could recommend this, because if you're very skilled in Silicon Valley, you can probably get a new job quickly - but it's probably nothing like being in YC.

I remember my first few years after college - I lived near the beach in San Diego, my rent was about $325 a month, and I surfed constantly. Then I went to grad school. Wouldn't have been a bad time to try a startup, I suppose.
Overheard at Transhuman Atlanta:

"I can't wait to get my hands on a 64-qubit computer!"

"What are you going to do with 64 qubits?"

"I don't know, but I'll be doing it very fast."
The problem with Yelp is that the reviews are mostly about the reviewers.
Buying a physical copy of music in the form of a CD confers addition benefits over a downloaded MP3 as well, one of which is the higher quality of uncompressed 16 bit audio (or better, if SACD or DVD-Audio versions are available).
Meh. Don't hug the developer. Teach them how to start their own business.
Actually, SUP allows sites to point to a SUP feed hosted elsewhere, so small sites can easily contribute to a shared SUP feed hosted elsewhere.

I'm going to write some to provide this shared SUP on top of AppJet as soon as I get a chance.

It is correct however that SUP is primarily intended for sites that have thousands of feeds, but there are more of those than you may realize.
Reminds me of the book "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell
Change I'd Like To See