skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
C# (and the possiblity of IronPython/Ruby/etc) is a much better language than Java, with many things that make it both nicer and more flexible/powerful to work with. I also must admit that I much prefer the .Net library, and the ability of C# and friends to take advantage of operator-overloading (something you can't do in Java) to actually use helpful syntax elements (such as bracket read/write to dictionaries, etc.).

Besides, I still feel like a 2nd class citizen with Java anyways... I use as few Microsoft products in my daily work/school life as I possibly can, but after using C#/Xna to make a few games in my classes, I was extremely impressed by C# and .Net. It's just too bad Microsoft is so draconian about everything, or else I wouldn't mind having C# as one of my primary languages right next to Python, PHP, and C/Lua...
Is fixing someone's mess really "hacking"?

People will need new stuff regardless of whether or not the old stuff works -- writing the new stuff is "hacking".
So if we had 4 purely random macbooks, and 3 of them failed, then that would be a meaningful indication that the failure rate is higher than 10%?

The issue is both small sample and lack of randomness.
What do you expect? Ask people for "perfect" and they'll give you "impossible." If you want something that's realistically perfect, chances are one of the leading laptops today nearly matches what you want.
Definately not what I would call a "perfect laptop".

"A detachable, integrated smartphone" Really?
Viking Age triggered by shortage of wives?
"the facts: the dollar hasn't dropped at all because of the 'bailout' - quite the contrary, it has done well over the past few days."

The bailout doesn't go into effect for at least a month.

And as far as expertise goes, your website could use a few Exceptions ("printDate() is not defined") - sorry, couldn't resist.
He's definitely advocating both, but reducing the advice to "work smarter and harder" strips out all of the social and cultural context which gives it motivational force.

The idea of making an "extraordinary effort" compels you to define your efforts relative to what's "ordinary", pitting you against not only your own everyday level of effort, but also against the masses. "Work smarter and harder" doesn't.

Granted, the post could've been more concise.
Sounds like the limit for the maximum number of open File Descriptors (FDs) was reached. On Linux, you can check the limit by doing:

cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max

You can change this limit:

echo 100000 > /proc/sys/fs/file-max

This limit is also available through the "fs.file-max" sysctl.

The "lsof" tool is great for seeing what FDs a process has open.

Note that FDs are used for more than just regular files: directories, sockets, pipes, and other file-like objects too.
UK broadband
Broadband service providers review and troubleshooting forum. Get help with configuration of modems and routers besides computer hardware and software related problems.
I know there have been more than a few businesses that succeeded based on killer partnership deals. I'm not a big fan though. I've seen incredible amounts of valuable time and energy wasted on partnerships. Probably 99% of them turn out to be totally useless. You're seriously gambling if you spend a significant amount of your resources trying to find that killer deal that will make your company.

I think for most early stage startups you should almost completely ignore any kind of interaction with other companies. Only once you have a ton of users or revenue can you afford to take some chances on deal making. Until then it's more likely you hurt you more than help you.

It's really a matter of efficiency. Working on your core product, gaining users, and making money is almost certain to be rewarded. Working on partnerships is almost certain to be a waste of time. Do you really have extra time or energy to waste?

Keep your head down. Let your competitors chase partnerships. Let them make fancy joint press releases. While they're busy looking good you can be busy becoming great.
Pure psycho-babble.

"If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon."
YouTube video about the Nakheel Tower (0:55):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtWFN6vBYx8
The parent is leaving out the demand side of supply and demand for the dollar. If one increases the money supply ceteris paribus then one may expect prices to rise and the value of a currency to fall. However, if foreign investors' expectations of the future performance of the US economy improve, then there will be more demand for the dollar and its value will rise on international currency exchanges. This reduces the price of foreign goods and combats inflation.

In practice, it is possible to engineer a short-term economic boom by increasing the money supply, so the supply and demand of dollars work against each other and it is impossible to say where its value will go. In the long term, the purchasing power of the dollar has dropped constantly since it went off the gold standard. However, nominal income and wealth has increased faster than the dollar's decline, so our living standards have increased.

I'm not an expert, so it's possible I am missing some big factor. However, I do have some training in the field, so I hope I am more right than wrong.
With no intention to disagree with what you're saying, I want to bring up the point that "colleges are businesses" doesn't apply nearly as much as, well, "businesses are businesses". It's an approximate model at best.

The poster child for this is the idea of "academic" work as being less valuable (in dollars, anyway) than work done in a business environment. It's more than just cultural — colleges don't suffer under market stress in quite the same way. Part of that effect is an appreciable tuition, walled garden style.

So then you have to question what an academic "floating" environment can provide. If half the reason you're there is because you're already motivated to succeed without being there, what do you gain? Does Ivy League provide that in greater amounts? How much do connections and environment really matter?

I feel like that might be the stronger question that'll lead to informative answers.
And noscript addon is always there to help https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addons/versions/722
I'd settle for a laptop that tells my coffeepot to make coffee.
Well, yeah. But where's the source code? IE 4 brought lots of innovation too, you know?

I'd take an open source IE 6 vs a super-duper IE 8, anytime.
I think what "work smarter and harder" misses the most is not the level of effort you need to make, but that in order to get to that level of "extraordinary effort" you need to take risks.

I think trying to reduce this post to one sentence is probably a bad idea anyways. I thought it was worthwhile reading.
The "perfect laptop" described here sounds more like The Homer. It's like they asked 10-year-olds to design it.
I mostly want less stuff in a laptop. A well-built 12" tablet, except:

- entirely solid state: no fans, mechanical hard disks, optical drives, or other moving parts barring the LCD,
- no touchpad, only trackpoint,
- no camera,
- no fingerprint reader,
- no "trusted computing" hardware,
- no Windows bundled,
- a serious warranty on the LCD: no dead pixels, free replacements if vertical dead lines in X years,
- good battery autonomy,
- decent linux drivers for all hardware available.

Still waiting..
> They're still struggling with Neopolitan Perl to support Windows without relying on the goodness of ActiveState.

I think Strawberry Perl has solved the pain of installing Perl on Windows. `cpan` actually works out of the box since the installation includes `gcc` and `make`. (I just wish it wouldn't automatically install to `c:\strawberry`.)
Good rule of thumb: Unit test the public API.
The bailout doesn't go into effect for at least a month.

That doesn't mean it can't have an effect on current prices. Market actors are capable of anticipating future market events. What is your take on Osborne Computer? Was it simply a coincidence that the market value of its then-current computer-model dropped when an improved model was announced?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

.

Is it simply coincidence -- rather than market anticipation -- that every time a corporate buyout at a specific price is announced, the stock price of the target company instantly jumps to, and flatlines at, the buyout price?
There's a difference between the notion of "working smarter", and the notion of being willing to leave your comfortable zone and do things outside your usual boundaries, when the ordinary result (or desperate result) isn't good enough.

What does "work smarter" mean operationally? If there were a little switch you could throw in your head, we wouldn't need the Overcoming Bias blog.
Or vice versa. From "The Dilbert Principle":

If you wake up in the middle of the night to heed nature’s call, take a moment to leave a voicemail message for your boss. Your message will automatically leave a recorded time-stamp, thus reinforcing the illusion that you work around the clock. This is a big improvement over reality -- that you chugged a beer before going to bed.
An ad-ridden site with content discussing an ad. Where is the downmod button when I need it?
Wufoo's Secret to Customer Happiness? Googly Eyes
Sony Ericsson G502 Unlocked
Sony Ericsson G502 is one of the latest mobile handsets with a unique feature of HSDPA to proffer an easy and fast access to internet while you are on your move.
Indeed, but isn't that going into the integration tests scope? :)
As someone that went through the program, I can say that it's the advisory board.
I'd also contend that, with the same frequency that it's good to create something really good for a niche instead of ok for the majority, it's good to create a fantastically capable ajax app that's only usable with tracemonkey, v8, or squirrelfish. The other great part is that the niche you're writing for is expanding geometrically.
netstat is also handy here (e.g. sometimes you find a single remote IP is holding open way more sockets than it should be).
may be he just needs to share more "just for fun" stories....just like his book "Just for fun"
Have you considered that this is foreign territory for investors, most of whose opinions regarding the efficacy of Paulsen's measures have yet to crystallize? Right now, this is beyond a bear market and people are acting on negative impulses: The government's doing something? Buy. Bad financial news? Sell. It's when the former becomes "sell" that inflation will become rampant.

Well, not literally; capital losses will likely cause serious deflation if the stocks really crash. But I don't see how a government pumping funny money into the market on this scale can do anything but devalue its currency severely.
I agree. (Incidentally, I wasn't trying to put down your comment specifically, in case it came across that way. I just replied to it since I didn't want to duplicate the point that working harder was also part of the equation.)
Launched ShopStyle API - Build shopping apps & make money
Track your cat with GPS:  Mr. Lee's CatTrack
What's on sale on the Internet - site showing off ShopStyle API
7 Tips for Working with Currency in Code
The page doesn't seem to render here.
Have you ever wondered how ECG machines work?
Actually, I wouldn't want the recipient to search for my name and ruin the surprise.
I've found that a lot of times there _is_ a little switch in my head. Every once in a while I'll be banging my head against a problem, but if I stop and ask myself "how would a physicist solve this?" I can figure it out.

It takes an effort for me to step back and ask myself what the problem is, rather than just sitting down and working on it.

Usually "just sitting down and working on it" works, which may mean my problems are too easy. :)
I love it when people that live in the Philly burbs bash the city. This is a lifestyle choice ... you're either a suburbanite or a city slicker. My opinion is that these likely don't mix well in any city.

There are plenty of neighborhoods in the city that are great places to live and are safe. I live in West Philly (Univ City), I walk 12 blocks to the office of my startup everyday, and I absolutely love it.

I posted other comments about Philly on news.yc a few weeks ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=295277
Exactly. I could do much better -- "It would have negative weight, so it would actually float. It would have 128 dual-core CPUs and 42 GPUs. It would ship with a new operating system that would do all my work without me even asking."

This is equally unrealistic, but a much better fantasy.
Ask YC: What do I do with an unproductive co-founder, 12+ months in?
"I release you, Ebenezer"

Things have gotten rough for our little company over the last few months.

We pushed to meet a market deadline, and stressed out both myself and my cofounder; What's more painful is that we strained our budgets- Putting him on Full time development for a few months, and taking out loans to finance the other development we needed.

Unfortuantely, since June or so, he hasn't been holding up his side of the company. He's written less than 100 lines of code in 4 months.

Although we've been friends for nearly 10 years, I had to call him last night, and tell him I wanted to buy him out.

The way I see it, there are really only two options-

* I buy him out, and try to develop on my own, possibly taking on a new co-founder..

* I abandon the project, pay off the loans, and lick my wounds, sacrificing the company, and my own financial health for the friendship.

It's stressful for both of us, but I'm trying as hard as I can to continue on, not let out beta users know there is a problem, and to preserve what I can.. I'm running out of options.

Forcing him to let me buy out his shares, using my departure as a unspoken threat, seems the only option I have, but It's a blunt cudgel, and it would leave me in a weakened position, with 95% of a finished project.

Is there any advice on what I should do? I've tried everything I could to motivate him to keep up his side--
I tried paying for his time, both on a monthly basis or hourly, but that doesn't help..
I tried engaging him with the users and the project, to try re-engage him with the excitement..
I don't know what to do.

We're past the 12 month vesting period we set up, so it seems that the best I can do is force him to sell out to me, but I'd appreciate any other options.
Light and with a DVI port. Why do most laptops (Apple is the only brand with DVI without a docking station, I think) only have VGA ports? DVI->VGA is trivial through a simple adaptor, if the graphics adaptor supports it (and it does), but the other way around is impossible.
You proved that failure rate for those 4 Macbooks was exactly 75%. Nothing more, nothing less.

Since you're being pedantic, I should point out that he's also proved that the total failure rate is at least three per however-many-Macbooks-there-are.
Generally true, though one component's "public API" is another (higher-level) component's "implementation details." I.e. just because a class has public methods, it might really just be an implementation helper for some other class, and not truly a public API, and unit testing it could cause more future maintenance pain than it's worth. So deciding what the public API really is isn't always easy.

My personal rule of thumb is very similar, though: "Test at the highest level of abstraction possible." If you've got some pretty complicated code that could combinatorially explode if you test higher up the stack, then unit test that code. Otherwise I've stopped testing every method and every class and focused on higher-level components and assemblages of classes wherever possible, since I've found those tests to be the most stable, cause the least maintenance pain, catch the most bugs up-front, and do the best job of catching regressions.

The errors I'm most likely to make are generally ones of assembly (i.e. putting the parts together wrong) rather than small-scale bugs like forgetting a null-check or flipping a > sign (i.e. the parts themselves don't work as designed), so I think it makes sense to optimize for catching those sorts of bugs, which generally will also catch most, but not all, of the small-scale bugs anyway.
Asking yourself "how would a physicist solve this?" is a good example of priming. I can't remember if I read about it in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, but there was an experiment where a couple groups were given a task, with one group told to imagine that they were professors. That group performed significantly better than the other.

But you'll notice that it takes something more specific than "work smarter" to change up the way you approach a problem.
Only if it were a pretty poster and a cute saying.

It's sometimes hard to convey in a sentence what we mean, especially something translated, so we take a whole blog post.
Aww, I was hoping this was made by Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong...
And a cupholder on both sides.
"You may think so now, but for a long time, Sun didn't allow distributors to include Java in their repositories"

that's really ancient news that has already changed.

if mono focused more on being a general CLR instead of just some bastard version of C# (that is a good number of versions and features behind), I'd be more for it. Unfortunately I feel that I just gave a pretty good description of it
language design wise C# is better than Java. Unfortunately community wise almost any open source language beats C# in terms of the speed of innovation. The reason: MS (as a whole) still hates and discourages open source projects (yeah codeplex is a good start).

I remember MS trying to stomp out NUnit with an inferior product, and instead of working with NHibernate they just decided to make changes to the language and release their own version - years afterwards... these are just a few examples, but to me it highlights the reason .NET will never be as good in terms of open libraries and tools
Out of curiosity, what on earth was he doing for those 4 months in which he wrote less than 100 lines of code? I get the sense that he may have other issues going on besides a lack of enthusiasm for the project.
You're right, and that's part of the problem.
I don't know how to fix that-

First, there were health problems, then family problems, then burnout problems, then, then, then..

I keep helping him fix them, but I worry that we're not making progress. It seems like every problem I fix, there's 2 more waiting to show up behind it.

I expect that in our product. It's a fact of life. But I don't know how to deal with it in a founder, and worse, a friend.

I wish there were a way to keep going, and have each of us put in a real effort, but experience tells me that I can't trust that it'll happen..

Meanwhile, there are real bills to pay, and new competitors on the radar.
Obfuscated TCP: opportunistic HTTP encryption
Obfuscated TCP is trying to provide a cheap way for websites to support encryption without users having to remember "https://", or paying for (and renewing) SSL certificates.

See also the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gykf57L-FiQ
"It is essential for a man to strive with all his heart, and to understand that it is difficult even to reach the average if he does not have the intention of surpassing others in whatever he does."

Only a wretch would aspire to surpass others. This guy's epitaph pegs him as shallow and insecure, and the rest of the post only further showcases his ignorance.
Generating PDFs with Django
Yup. A big part of good design is making tradeoffs, which isn't really addressed hear.
Already a big thread about this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=324688
The perfect laptop is a 10" MacBook Air

For only $999
"...making a desperate all-out effort as if your own life were at stake..." This may be specific to your (extended) family. While it is foolhardy to speak of any unified cultural milieu for India, I think it is fair to say that predestination has largely been accepted and reveals itself in the way our culture gave rise to rigid class stratification. And predestination, almost by definition, discourages risk-taking.

Within these class boundaries, you do have people striving to reach conventional goals, but rarely at risk to the family (which tends to be established early).

Also, the largest nurturing family structure, the Indian bureaucracy (where most of the educated Indian workforce was employed until the nineties) instills passivity and "do-just-enough-ness".

These value are changing, but the change is really glacial outside the few, truly cosmopolitan, western influenced cities and social strata.
Do you have any outside investors, or have you been self funded for now?
I've been asking for this for years to no avail. Even a ten-second delay would be enough to prevent a lot of "sender's remorse".
My cat would go nuts if I put one of these on it.
Making it real by making it closer
We've been funded mostly through my paying for servers, software, his office space, and equipment out of pocket, and taking out a bank loan to cover outsourcing some dev, and paying him for full-time work for a few months.

The full-time work didn't work out, since nothing was being produced, so we went back to part-time.. The idea was to tie input directly to output.. If he worked hours, we'd send him a check.. But this didn't result in more hours, just in our paying less ;(
What about helping your co-founder with motivation? Perhaps you could have a meeting and talk about where things stand, what your next steps are, and define the paths you can take at this point. You listed two of them above, and the third is that you both step up and bring your A game, and accomplish your goals. Slumps should lead to comebacks, not retirements.
All of those things are burnout. I've seen it before.

Not that this is helpful now -- but these things should have been decided when you guys started. Partnership agreements are important for this reason. I wouldnt have an arrangement with a stranger I dont care about without a partnership agreement, so having set arrangements with friends is that much more important. Assuming that you dont have a partnership agreement, with productivity/milestones built in, or with buyout terms already negotiated, then its going to be tricky.

This is also another reason that ownership vests with time as things move forward.

Clearly, part of the issue here is that you want to remain friends. So if you offer to little, and then make it successful later on, he's going to be pissed off. Alternatively, if he wants too much, and you cant pay it, then you both get pissed off and it falls into the shitter.

Probably the only reasonable way to go about this is to sit down and just discuss whether he A- still wants to do this, and B- if he wants out, what makes sense for both of you.

You might think about offering him some sort of buyout that involves later payments to keep things cheap now. For Example, you could offer him $5k now for his voting rights and ownership, with the understanding that if/once the company starts making money, he would get some portion of net profits, or even revenue.

Alternatively, try the reverse. Let him keep his equity, but put into a place where you will gain new equity as you reach new milestones, and that all your expenses/investments will get paid back before any dividends to owners. In that way, eventually he will be watered-down to virtually no ownership, but if you get a buyout offer in 12 months he still gets a peice of the pie.

Depending on your state laws, though, you probably cant 'force' him out. So if you cant work it out amicably, there isnt much of a way to do it.
Flag.

It may be interesting to some, but its clearly an attempt at viral marketing.
Also, one question -- are you equal owners?
I think the largest problem using this is finding out your cat is having a lot more fun than you are.