skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Program your Finances: Reporting for Fun and Profit
I think about what I am going to make, then if one week later that idea or project came to mind again. I start sketching a basic implementation of it.
This really is excellent advice. I've never quite phrased it this way, but the mental image is very funny and smart. I wonder what the approach would be to using this analogy with an actual client, manager, or team.
Not bad. He should save the projects (.proj) files in textual format, it would allow people to merge them when using version control system (p4, git, svn, etc.)
Uh so you wrote that bad code isn't a factor ..

imagine if it had taken you 2 weeks to write the code instead of 6 months and you spent the rest of the 2 years on customer discovery instead, imagine if you were able to make significant feature changes to your product in a few days based on what you found out about what your customers wanted .. do you think you would have been more successful?

The fact that you used lines of code as a metric for how much work you put in, and the fact that you think 30k is a lot of code .. and you used php/flex .. I don't want to rain on your parade but there are MUCH MUCH better coders out there, who can do stuff much much faster. I don't necessarily recommend the following languages overall but you might want to check out ruby or python and see what is possible in just a few days.
Super 15 Celebrities Movie Transformations
http://radiomap.eu
There are plenty of cold-blooded species that live in places that freeze in the winter, notably including all plants. So somehow your logic has a flaw.
I'm currently reading Cooking for Geeks[1] enjoying it a lot. Check it out if you're "analytically minded."

[1] http://www.cookingforgeeks.com/
You didn't. Someone else did, so they post it again and again.
Globe-spreading supercomputer cloud
Yeah, I agree that I got a bit worked up in my response and my language was a bit stronger than it needed to be. I guess it was driven a bit by:

a) nodejs is resulting in a ton of interesting projects. whether it is the best design decision to use nodejs in these projects instead of something else is another question. the creativity nodejs has helped spark is awesome in itself.

b) if the OP was referring to creating battle-tested server applications, he/she should have made that clearer. yes nodejs is immature and crashes left and right.

c) OP titles like this one (i.e. generalized statement the OP knows to not be true) do not foster productive discourse and community
> Is it just me, or is this actually a good argument /for/ Apple owning the term "App Store"? People keep making the claim "it is an obvious name", but apparently it wasn't for GetJar: it wasn't until Apple gave that term meaning by applying it to their product that GetJar decided to use the term.

It's a good argument for the term "app store" being original with Apple. However, being the first one to use a term, does not mean you "own" it.

Under the law, one can register a trademark, which gives one exclusive rights to the term under certain restricted conditions. However, as the article points out, Apple did not get a trademark free & clear.
Personally I think the main problem was lack of commitment in customer discovery and how much were you paying the PHD students? Why weren't they motivated enough to help you advertise? In the US, most graduate students assist professors in teaching classes, so they would have direct contact with the people who would want your services the most.

What was your motivation for your startup? Did you just want to make a buck, or did you really care about helping students do better in their exams? Do you think the decisions you made would have been different if you had different motivations?
Allow me to flog WuWei, http://wuwei.name, a toolkit for doing Ajax web UIs in Common Lisp, now in production use on http://biocyc.org .
Will there be any funding if i have a startup, since i am from the subcontinent(south asia) and not living close to any Sillicon Valley.
Previous comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2727454

tl;dr I really want to be able to mute people and/or entire circles. This won't "block" them; it just means that I won't have to see their messages unless they specifically target me.
DDD is suffering badly from lack of love... I fired it up on my Debian dev box the other day and it was painful to use, so unresponsive. A real shame, I remember when it was the power tool of choice. GDB + Emacs is very usable.
not for floats (which javascript numbers are) on x86 (using the XMM registers, I don't know the x87 numbers offhand), last I checked a MULSD is 5 cycles, and ADDSD is 3, therefor conversion doesn't generally make sense.
If somebody puts that on a t shirt ill buy it. Bonus points for a funny cartoon.
Problem is some stuff might actually be illegal. If you host a baby forum and somebody posts kiddy porn, keeping it around for too long is a bad idea.
The state of HTML5 for mobile app development
I figure out what exactly I am doing, and more importantly why exactly I am doing it. It's easy to sit down and thing "I want to change the world, I want to beat Facebook of Google at their game, I want to develop an awesome game or a tool that everyone needs." Ideas are a dime a dozen. It's the hows and whys of an idea that really define the scope, complexity, and execution of your project.
My university is actually changing the major to Python for the first 3 courses, and then switching over to C++ for the remainder of the program. With our languages class still using Scheme and having to learn an additional 2 scripting languages. Sadly, I took the curriculum when the beginning and through most of it was Java. I guess I just get to learn it on my own then :)
It goes deeper than that. He has used back references. So formally it aren't real regular expressions anymore. (Back references rewrites the grammar on the fly).

Perl regular expressions are pretty powerful. I wrote a small perl program (just for fun after reading the post), which can parse S-Expressions. It wrote it quick, but it shows it is possible:

http://pastebin.com/ndrHTZJB

I know it has bugs.
Looks pretty useful! I wonder if a simple application of TF/IDF could improve the results by giving you better token weights. (Then you'd have to be comparing token sets, of course, rather than strings.)
Agreed on having to have a good enough culture around people, processes, and tools.

On the other hand, if your problem is more about animosity between groups or individuals than broken processes and an unwillingness to have them change, then there's merit. Having engineers partner on non-critical projects with other engineers, product managers and other non-engineering staff can build up an understanding of their value and purpose, as well as just letting each to know the other as a person.
I'm with you on this, I'm personally outraged by the situation, and the analogy to mob protection rackets is way too accurate for comfort.

The analogy has me thinking about how real mob protection rackets are dealt with (well, at least in the movies). The individual small business owner can't directly fight back, they have ties to the community that they have a real chance of losing, just like a software house that want's to be able to operate in the U.S. can't just up and leave or afford to fight back. The consequence is a legal equivalent of having your shop burned down. The only real power that can fight this kind of collusive power is that of public opinion. Other commenters have already mentioned this, but we cannot dismiss it because Google is an unsympathetic giant, we have to do something because you and I are the ones in real danger.

We don't have pi billion dollars to hire lawyers or bid on patent bundles, but we are the small guys, the rags to riches, the huslters, the american dream. Software patents are a lie invented by old people to stomp out innovation and maintain the status quo. If anyone can make software patents sound bad and get sympathy it's going to be us. We need to find a way to make these issues matter to people, to put it in their minds and tug on their heartstrings.

I don't know how to do it as an activist, but I bet we could do it as story tellers, as bloggers and media producers. We are the generation building the products and services of tomorrow, we know how things should work and what we want things to look like. In my opinion, we need to produce some pop culture. I've watched a lot of crime drama's, what's to stop us from making a biz drama with the same human impact but set in the context of the information age rather than NY city streets.

Even Google can't fight on their field, what chance do we have going head-on against money and greed. Our best hope is to use the most powerful weapon we have, public opinion.
Google+Facebook allows you to see your Facebook stream inside Google+
Nice, I'll promoted it on my facebook Sudoku fan page next monday.
Picking the Lock of Google's Search
I would say another advantage of Javascript is that virtually everyone can run Javascript in their browser, while python is a separate environment. There's the step where you have to install the interpreter or at least use something you might never have used before, and there's the step where you have to connect command-line oriented problem-solving with presentation.
Maybe if you made the app free to use and have introduced a karma system , such as the one on StackOverflow, it would maybe make your (ad)venture more successful.

Personally the Flex UI puts me off -- the first impression after clicking the demo button. (The site frontpage looks ok)

I agree that a simple text annotation version would be much better and appealing. (its easier to upload a .doc or .pdf of your work, than scanning it, people who prefer to handwrite are less likely to use any online services than those who prefer doing stuff on their computer when possible
Pen on clean whiteboard.
'Like' It or Not, Sharing Tools Spur Privacy Concerns
I answer the question "Am I passionate enough about this to put at least 3 months in it knowing that it is more likely to fail than succeed?"
Non Academic life lessons learnt in a US university
Avoiding EFS Encryption Disasters in Windows
Dear Author:

Have you considered writing a humor column? I am sure it would be well received. That was a truly funny article.
Add the project to gitolite.conf

git remote add origin git@FQDN.com:new_project.git
git push origin master
git config branch.master.remote origin
git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/master
>So why are they after the small people like GetJar??

To be consistent. They're not out to get Amazon. They're out to own the term "App Store" and are proving it by going after anyone who tries to use it. So in court they can say that it isn't just the big guys that are infringing but also smaller players.
This article is incoherent and incomprehensible. It seems to be a set of responses to things an unspecified person (possibly Stonebraker) may or may not have said at some time in the past (but mostly not in the Gigaom article it links to). But without the context of knowing what those things are, it doesn't make any sense.
Why haven't you used Rails for this project? I can see on GitHub that you know Rails. I believe that using it you would have developed the app faster.
sometimes big companies hire me to tell them what to do with their beans, then they are disappointed that i did not tell them to stick them up their noses.

in the next step they claim i missunderstood the question, the question was not really about "what to do with the beans", it was more about "how should we stick them up our noses in the best way"
Kiplinger's Magazine Hacked: Up to 170k Subscribers Information Stolen
E-Books on Haskell
Shag Hairstyles
Great looking haircuts don’t just happen; a shag haircut needs to be cut by a stylist who has an eye for face shape, proportion, and your hair type.
It will probably be ugly and I'm not convinced there is a next-thing that will pull America out. Demographics look bad, we've nuked or productive capacity and the culture has rapidly decayed in the last twenty years. There is graft and fraud well marbled throughout the entire corporate and government superstructure.

I realize I'm a paranoid nut job, but I think Gold, Guns and Startups is the right straddle: Gold and Guns for the obvious reasons, Startups because, hey, things could work out (they usually do) and because owning common stock or bonds puts you too far away from the value creation, introducing those troublesome layers of graft and fraud.
HTC Desire Gingerbread Updated Will Be Available This Month
Harry Potter ain't got nothing on this
Try Vimium: http://vimium.github.com/
BustAName.com

Not that this is really the most important, it just helps me wrap my head around it if I can start calling it something.
To exploit the advantages of the JVM. Can you imagine letting the jvm handle GC and JIT for you?
A response to Correlated's critics
Show HN: 114,444 Google+ profiles indexed and organized. What do you think?
http://www.findpeopleonplus.com - So far we've indexed 114,444 Google+ profiles. We've added faceted navigation and search functionality so far.

Any feedback, thoughts would be awesome.

Thanks,
Steve Ballmer: Imagine Cup 2011
Goldmansachs's Profile - GitHub
express <appname>
Warren Buffett's 5-Minute Plan to Fix the Deficit
This is my fault really, the first paragraph of the homepage contains the following remark:

> APR powers software such as the Apache webserver and Subversion and Lua/APR makes the APR operating system interfaces available to Lua, serving as an extended standard library.

I wrote that description because I like Lua so much that I want to use it not only for embedding but also for writing standalone scripts. However I found that writing standalone Lua scripts that run on both Windows and UNIX is hard because Lua's standard library contains almost no operating system interfaces (e.g. no directory handling and minimal process handling). Also lots of third party libraries either work on Windows or POSIX systems but not both.

After reading your comments and those by compay about Penlight I realized that "standard library" may not be the best way to describe the Lua/APR binding because its focus is really on being an extended operating system interface.
You coded it in six months and the whole project start to when you gave it up was only a year? Most startups I know of take several years to get any revenue at all. You need to have brass balls and a rich friend / family / side consulting to keep eating and paying rent / expenses.

You received 3000 GBP in startup money competitions, no strings attached, the first year. That's pretty damn good. I know startups that have raised a million dollars and don't have that much revenue.

Don't forget advertising. Sure you need lots of hits to make good revenue, but I know guys living off only ads for their apps. They also offer paid versions, but these tend to be a minority of the revenue. Don't underestimate what adsense/admob plus some social media exposure can get you.

You probably don't realize how successful you are already. That leads me to believe that if you stick to it, you're going to be quite successful. It may take 20 years, but eventually you're going to get some traction.

It's not the idea. It's not really even execution. It's persistence. If you keep trying your startup long enough, you'll eventually make enough to live. Maybe not be rich, maybe not make as much as you could have in a big corp (TM), but you'll survive, and you'll be your own boss.

My family has been doing startups for literally generations. I'm not rich, and neither are they, but we've survived. We did it by being persistent.

Stick with it, and I know you'll succeed. Don't give up.
Speaking as somebody who generally plays a lead BD role vs. programming (but I'm assuming this question is a level higher than programming, with project being a startup).

1) Ask why people would use it (problem)

2) Figure out who would buy it (exact names, contacts)

3) Rough Wireframes, 5 slide pitch deck

4) That's all I need to meet with customers and get orders. I won't move forward until orders are secured and signed.
Want To License Your Music To Film & Television Projects
FYI: I'm considering adding a binding for the pollset module.
LLVM European User Group Meeting 2011 - Call For Participation
Yikes. It's 3am here in Japan, but I think I'll go out right now to get some candy that will better represent what there is on offer here.
This is something that Google+ needs to deal with immediately. It's also a problem that Twitter faces.

Certain folks tend to dominate or flood my Twitter or Google+ stream - but muting/blocking/unfollowing them is not really an option.

From a usability point of view, it would be great to have a slider or a similar control that will allow me to tweak how often Person X's posts are displayed in my stream. Everyone in a Circle is not equally important.
FWIW: I had a student cheat by using a paid answer service during a final exam (in class but done online, easy to abuse a website when I'mnott looking). I figure it cost him over $300 to buy the answers (obviously not his writing style and proficiency); still failed the class.

Make sure assisting on those "practice" exams aren't real ones.
this can be dangerous thinking.

sticking with a project that has no momentum for a long time can be a huge waste of time. better to focus on finding momentum as quick as possible either in the current project or abandon and find new one. there's a lot of interesting things to do in the world
Create short URL for your Google + profile link.
Using Facebook as a "Social Database" for Investigative News Applications
This is an excellent summarization and well reflects my own experiences building mobile apps with Phonegap. I found that while Appcelerator is an interesting platform, it takes the developer too far away from the core capabilities of the mobile device. By this I mean that you have many options using their custom JavaScript API, but you get little control over the final product.

Conversely, while I ended up using Phonegap for a couple of published apps, I quickly ran into the limitations inherent of that framework. One big example was the desire to play video (either remote or local). The feature simply doesn't exist in the framework.

Despite the lack of features in some aspects, phonegap is still my preferred framework because it's extensible. I get the benefit of rapid development using html5, CSS, and js while being able to edit or add objective-c code where needed to make extra stuff work.

My final conclusions were that Phonegap is good for phase 1 apps or apps that are relatively simple. Native apps are the way to go if you expect high performance.
Yeah, Generate the data (JSON) that the javascript will work with, don't generate the javascript. That way we can have easy to serve, easy to cache static javascript.
1. AFAIK, Go itself isnt self-hosting, either.

2. If I were to aim for a self-hosted go on the JVM, this could easily be one of the steps. Compile a 'Go written in Go' with this, and you are done (well, you would probably want to tune the runtime afterwards to get decent performance, but those are 'merely' details)
When I had a startup selling software to banks, sales cycles were never less than a year, often more so.
Standard Go doesn't need JIT, it is all compiled to native code already.
but they lost that right with the Amazon judgement, the original question remains why now go after anyone using Appstore words combination?
I find it exciting that there are others who have also realized that programming skills are going to be as necessary to success today as reading and writing have been for the past few centuries.

I had the same epiphany last year and wrote about it along with what I thought it would lead to:

http://www.yacoset.com/Home/the-future-of-it

Yes, I'm boasting that "I thought of it first", but I have a feeling that maybe I haven't.

Because new necessary skills come along all the time. If you can't drive a car today, for example, you're severely disadvantaged. Or the ability to type more than 20 wpm, or coordinate your thumbs with what a character/cursor does on a screen, or comprehend cause-and-effect once you throw computers and the Internet into the mix.

In another couple of decades there'll be a new skill that everyone has to learn, or else resign to flipping burgers. I, for one, am looking forward to it.

Not the burger flipping part, tho.
People Staring at Computers
Well if you like, you can thank us by buying a very expensive ticket on SeatGeek =P
From the twitter spritzer feed, only ~0.05-0.10% of tweets contained "Google+". So the headline seems a little fishy to me, although of course not all tweets contain a "Tweeted news link".
Yea, self-hosting is neat, but also makes bootstrapping much more complicated, specially when the language is still changing.
Compiled Go is roughly the same performance as Java, so no I cant see a big win here. Sure there is some work needed on Go optimisation and GC.
I agree that C++ is horrible, but I was under the impression that everyone who knows C would have at least learned C++ before discarding it, making it possible to at least use C++ libraries.
The thing about this idea is that it isn't (or certainly doesn't have to be) a full-time job.

Initial set-up costs should be low, and afterwards this is probably a one- or two-days-a-month job, with an income to match.

(And yeah, that cliff-hanger is a bit unnecessary, to be honest.)
I turn on my Boards of Canada Pandora station and do a bunch of research. Jot some ideas down. Think about who would use it.
Reminds me of Yahoo! Pipes
The University of Michigan is also pretty heavily C++.
Libraries. Provided it will give you the the ability to call into other jvm libraries it gives you huge leverage. Just like scala, jruby etc.
Also, there still plenty of low hanging fruit to optimize in Go, both in the compilers and GC, so surpassing Java wont be hard.

And Go's memory usage is already magnitude orders better than Java.
CloudFlare: Why You Should Seriously Consider Using the App
Re your point one: This service wasn't for help with what an American would call term papers. It was for help with exams, which you have to write yourself (unless you hire someone to impersonate you, which I'm sure is not unheard of in big classes but is certainly riskier).
I know this feeling intimately, having tried a little consulting and having a serious ethical bend towards the truth.

The fact is, the better I get at programming (and math and science) the more I know I don't know, and the less confident I am about any given problem. The thing I make myself remember though, is that I'm damn good at solving problems. I may not have implemented this algorithm yet, or used this technology stack or programming language, but rest assured in a couple hours I will know what I should look out for and how I should proceed.

When I speak with the confidence in my ability to learn, something I have proven to myself, I no longer feel like I am faking or deluding some innocent luddite. I am giving comfort to somebody who needs my problem solving skills.

At least, that's how I justify it :)
Thanks! Yes, the textbook as a reference frame makes a lot of sense and we do see that come up in user tests.

How would you find out the point at which users are likely to pay?