skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This Is Broken: Seth Godin at Gel 2006
Like any powerful tool, if wielded by the untrained or inexperienced, it can lead to bad results.
COBOL. That is all.
Haha true. And I know it's tempting to diggify headlines/articles/etc because short-term traffic optimization is like sex without a condom: feels oh so good in the short term but can ruin you in the long run.

To your credit, the article was informative and not diggified at all.
The idea is that a gene in isolation does not exist in nature. You get the patent on the gene isolated from the rest of the DNA. Not saying it is "right"...

In other words, you get a patent on using some extract of DNA for a useful purpose like determining cancer susceptibility.
Five reasons this VC is full of it and you should stay in the valley:

1: The weather is great and winter is a place on the Nevada/California border you go visit. People don't translate frustration with shitty weather into frustration at work.

2: There is not better place to recruit than the valley. End. Of. Story.

3: More VCs and better options if you decide to cut out the maze bullshit and just head for the goal. You won't spend your time groveling for intros to the few Boston VCs who do not have their heads firmly wedged up their ass.

4: Exit is an option. Unlike Boston, companies in the valley occasionally get bought.

5: There are academics available as board members and even (gasp) real net-savvy business execs who have been through three or four bubbles and can provide you with more than an ivory-tower viewpoint.
I wonder how many of the TC50 companies are in the valley (I'm too lazy to count right now)
Photoshop is a terrific tool for manipulating absolute raster images.

But the web is fluid interpretive hypertext, not PDF! There is a massive impedance mismatch -- if your starting point when you approach the web is an image, you are totally fucked.

Start with hypertextual substance, and add style slowly where appropriate.
One of my favourite Seth Godin riffs - but it made waiting for a cab @JFK even more irritating.
6. It's much cheaper to live here in Boston than in San Francisco.

That being said, I have been to SF a few times, I love it, and we plan to move there once we are making enough money that it doesn't have a significant impact on our bottom line.
Claude Shannon, a pretty smart person, would probably disagree with you and them. Shannon-Hartley helps to derive a maximum on how much information can be transmitted at a given frequency with a given power bound. If you allow that the power devoted to transmission is bounded -- that there is only so much of the global power supply available for broadcast by all parties -- you can work out max ranges of how much information could be transmitted globally.

While that quantity of potential information is substantially more than the available quantity, that's a different assertion than infinite spectrum.

And yes, this reply basically says that if we require angels to comply with physics, there is an upper bound on the number of angels on the head of a pin. So what?
Got me. Every once in a while he has a very worthwhile post, the rest is vapor, filled with unnecessary buzzwords, obvious or not very useful. Here's an example of a few his posts that I found insightful/useful:

http://is.gd/2oWe

http://is.gd/2sJw

http://is.gd/TJD

The problem is: his best posts are good enough to keep me reading him every once in a while so he wins. If you want to know about marketing/PR my recommendation is to read Made to Stick.
New version of the Joel Test (draft, asking for feedback)
I think I'm being misunderstood here.

People don't seem to understand the concept of WHERE data is housed very well. My mom probably doesn't know that the email she reads is stored on Yahoo's servers. To her there is just a screen that she types into and her email is there.
I will replace Jesus in the next 2 years as the standard for Western deities.
Never noticed News.YC's CO2Stats before.  How do they compute this stuff anyway?
My instinct would be to do it with some kind of Metropolis Monte Carlo algorithm.

1. For initial conditions, distribute digits randomly throughout the 3x3 boxes. The only condition we need to apply at this stage is to not repeat a digit within a 3x3 box.

2. Calculate the number of "clashes" -- i.e. rows or colums where there's a digit repeated.

3. Make a trial move: Pick a 3x3 box at random, pick two squares within it, and swap their digits (obviously, don't pick squares with 'fixed' digits in them).

4. Recompute the new number of clashes C. If the new number of clashes is less than the old one, the move is accepted. If the new number is larger than the old one, it's not necessarily rejected, but will be accepted with a probability proportional to exp(-dC) (this gives us a small chance of moving "uphill" in clash-space so we don't get trapped in local minima).

5. If the number of clashes is still greater than zero, go back to 3.

I don't know how efficient this would be. Probably better than brute force.
Seth's job, in his own words, is to remind you of things you already know. It's hard to explain why people love Seth so much. All I can really do is point you to some of his best stuff.

* This Is Broken: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4101280286098310645

* Hard Work: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/69/sgodin.html

* All his books, especially All Marketers are Liars, Permission Marketing, and Free Prize Inside.

* His best blog posts are collected in the book Small Is The New Big. I love all of Seth's vintage stuff, but my personal favorite is probably his post Clean Fire Trucks: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/12/clean_firetr...
I was really surprised it hadn't already been posted. I just dug it up in response to this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=300863
I love it, you get sooooo many choices from uber creative people. Just don't be a cheapass. Better to spend $500 and get hundreds of submissions, instead of spending $100 and getting only 10.
I wonder how much text messaging costs in China, where $0.20 USD is a larger fraction of the average person's income. I suspect it's much cheaper, and yet the companies presumably aren't losing money on it.
That's not what I wrote nor is it what I suggested. As I made clear, in his attacks on DEMO, Michael Arrington claimed that the fees DEMO charges presenters are tantamount to "payola." One of his blatant insinuations was that startups shouldn't be forced to pay to present because doing so is exploitative and drains them of capital that could be put to better use elsewhere.

He argued that TechCrunch50 selections were completely merit-based and that he is now providing the only major launch venue that's financially viable for young startups that don't have a spare $18,500.

Frankly, I think if you look at the startups that were selected and who is behind them, you can only come to two possible conclusions:

1. Silicon Valley's consumer internet scene is seriously f*cked.
2. Startups founded by (or associated with) people Arrington knows or is connected to in some way were favored.

I could honestly care less about the selections but calling Arrington's disingenuous arguments about TechCrunch50 disingenuous (which was the point of my post) is well-deserved in this case, especially after Valleywag pointed out that a startup involved with Michael Arrington's associate, friend and Edgeio co-founder Keith Teare was included. Apparently Teare is a TechCrunch shareholder as well if that's not enough conflict for you.
What good does speaking out against a company do? Unless there is some impact on the bottom line why would a company ever change? If one is going to complain he/she should be willing to create a financial incentive for that company to do the right thing.

In the case of Google one could start by not clicking on advertising, not using Google to advertise or not using AdSense (assuming of course that one is currently generating some sort of revenue for Google).
Could we make this post: dead

If you want this kind of discussion, go to http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/
I wasn't thinking Java. I was thinking lisp or python.
That seems fairly odd to me. Most people at least understand that since they have to go to Yahoo to access their email Yahoo is storing a copy of their email. The exact details of how that email is being stored might not be relevant. People have traditionally entrusted companies with lots of data and there is usually the expectation that a company will not allow it to be misused.

A good analogy might be a bank. I know my money is in the bank. I don't know exactly where or how the bank keeps my money, but I would not like it very much if I found out they actually let their employees take a small chunk of my money home for safe keeping in order to reduce storage costs.
On Stupidity, Part 2 - Exactly how should we teach the 'digital natives'?
Pogue’s Posts - DoMyStuff.com
Introversion Software released a lot of development stuff for their game Uplink (tagline: Trust is a Weakness) on a separate CD. You can download the contents of the CD from their site as well: http://www.introversion.co.uk/uplink/otherfiles.html
Drugs for optimising morality
The link doesn't really say why spec work is unethical. It seems like they are frustrated because designers can do a bunch of work and then not get paid if they don't win the contest. That doesn't seem unethical, that's just how the system is set up. If it isn't a good deal for you as a designer because you can get better jobs easily, then don't participate in these contests.

Personally (I'm a programmer) I would never do work for someone else with payment contingent on whether they liked it on not. But I don't think it's evil or unethical to do so, it's just not a good deal for me, so I don't do it.
Reminds me of my OS design final project, where we added a syscall for "IsComputerTurnedOn" that returned true if the computer was turned on, undefined otherwise. ;-)
It's much cheaper to live here in Boston than in San Francisco.

It is? I've lived in both Cambridge and SF and I thought the rental prices in the city were about the same. My apartment in San Francisco is cheaper than my apartment in Cambridge.

Maybe it is cheaper to buy in Cambridge/Boston?

It definitely seems cheaper to buy a place in Boston's burbs than it is in Silicon Valley, Marin, the Peninsula or the East Bay. A friend bought a gigantic McMansion out by Concord for $600K. A house that size 15 miles out of SF or San Jose would be $2-10 million depending on the town.
Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret
IF YOU WANT TO SAVE THE WORLD, TURN OFF JAVASCRIPT IMMEDIATELY!!!
"Why do people keep moaning about the price tag and speculating on the industrial aspects..."

Maybe because billions of dollars of taxpayer money are being used to fund this project. You can spend your own money however you want, but if you want public funding, you will have to put up with questions about whether this expenditure will actually make the world a better place for ordinary people.
MacBook updates coming on October 14th
I was in the 80% case when I wrote vlad. cap does NOT work fine. It is a steaming pile of intertwined crap... imhfo.

We got the 80% usage case of vlad covered in about a 3rd() of the code that cap required.

) actually &pi;. In the release notes for vlad 1.1: "The flog ratio between capistrano+deps / vlad+deps is pi (or, damn close)!". Line numbers correlated fairly close iirc.
Chromium Blog: Security Architecture
Not being able to touch type is not a bad thing; not being able to type fast is. I can't touch type and I used to be able to type 130+ wpm without errors. I can still average around 100 wpm.
Great question! We measure quite a variety of signals, including but not limited to client locations (e.g., is traffic coming from coal-burning areas?), visit lengths, server locations, transfer sizes, transfer times, and window sizes. These signals are fed into a "hand-built" database that allows us to compute aggregate carbon footprints.
Here's the main thread on swype:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=299938
Ask YC: Rideshare to Hack Day?
Planning on going to Sunnyvale this weekend?

How about we make the best out of a gassy situation, and talk shop while we sit in traffic.

I'm either looking for a ride, or potentially to give a ride. You see, my environmentally conscious girlfriend says I can only borrow her car if its for a carpool.

Yes, I am "whipped".
How to Save a Billion Dollars (Chunka Mui interviewed by Kawasaki)
Reading language manuals out of the pure need to survive doesn't count.
The most comprehensive list of useful open source server apps ever assembled
Very interesting . . . best of luck with the venture!
I've seen this argument for why Chrome is going to be a big deal and I don't buy it. Some subset of people click on links and use/buy things just because they are there. The rest of the world does it to solve a problem (real or perceived).

How many ways has MS encouraged upgrading to IE7, yet STILL 50% of salesforce.com users are using IE6. From 2001. For them (or the people with the authority to upgrade), the browser just simply isn't broken enough to warrant the pain of upgrading.

Exactly how much does MS-Office have to suck before people shift to Google Docs? A lot more than it does now.
Zen style programming - online book
We have an open source project http://allmydata.org that has been doing this for quite awhile. I'm also involved in the commercial side which does online storage and we've been running a business on a P2P backend (nice low costs) with non-peer clients. We tried a business model with a full peer grid and users were extremely uncomfortable storing "data" from other people on their computers. Possibly the market is better educated now and/or more used to this idea, but it may be a hard sell.
Some subset of people click on links and use/buy things just because they are there. The rest of the world does it to solve a problem

Do you have data to back this up? My anecdotal experience with every person I know from my grandma to my niece to my girlfriend suggests exactly the opposite behavior.

The rest of the world clicks on links and uses/buys things just because they are there, and some smaller subset of people do it to solve a problem. ;-)
I wouldn't criticize them for this. They probably had other things to do in that time.
Why not help change it?

Because non-Windows programmers already have plenty of better, ad-free places to go for help.
I'm not really sure what you're getting at with your retort.

1. The claim was that in crappier weather people tend to stay in and work instead of lounging about in the sun. That's not to say that this is true, but simply stating that SV has good weather is missing the point.

2. Just because there are lots of people in the Valley to recruit doesn't mean they are automatically better than workers from elsewhere. The ease at which you can fill your company with seemingly qualified people is not tied with how good of a product of how successful a company will be. The article makes a good point about ship jumping and spiking salaries.

3. Your again confusing quantity with quality. You'll still be groveling to get a chance to present at any of the top level VC's in SV and since there are a lot more presentations being made, the chances that they've seen same idea you're trying to present three times already that week means you'll still likely have to settle with the bottom of the VC pile. That is unless you have a good idea and a good presentation in which case top VC's in Boston, Tel Aviv or any other place would be just as happy to have you. This is all besides the fact that plenty of successful startups bootstrapped themselves to success.

4. A startup does not need to 'Exit' in order to be successful. Not all startups have the goal of hoping that Google/MS/Yahoo/Ebay will one day look down pick them as the prettiest girl at the dance, some startups want to be the ones doing the picking and plenty are fine just making decent money doing something they love. A narrow focus of an Exit only strategy puts many startups in an early grave despite good chances of becoming successful in other ways.

5. Good board members can be found just about anywhere on the planet and with teleconferencing technology as it is now, being located in the same city as every board member is not necessary and actually might be a hindrance. Besides that, I'm not quite sure what three other bubbles happened in SV other than the Dot Com one?

There are plenty of good reasons to startup in SV, but that don't make it the only place where a startup can be successful.
CISCO copies MTV's CRIBS gist to make Digital Cribs
Ask HN: Is the Windows development experience getting worse?
I am currently working on a project that makes use of Microsoft's Volume Shadow-Copy Service API. This is API is one of the most poorly implemented and horribly documented Windows APIs I have ever used.

However, frustrated as I am, I am not very surprised by this. As I have developed applications for Windows for the past 15 years, I have noticed the steady degradation in the quality of APIs/libraries and tools from Microsoft.

The decline in quality has been even more stark because I have spent part of the past 3 years developing applications for Linux using open source libraries and tools. Without hesitation, I can say that the open source libraries and tools I have used are better designed and documented, and more consistent in behavior. Their communities are more helpful and responsive too.

Does anyone else think the Windows development experience is getting worse?
Doesn't that count as 'bait-and-switch?'
Smoke, mirrors, reading of dead chicken entrails...

You know, the usual PT Barnum stuff to impress the rubes.

Interesting paragraph from their site: "CO2Stats reserves the right to cap REC purchases in case of excessive use, as its own discretion."

That is, you could pay them $100 a month and they may or may not purchase offsets to cover your 5 million page views.
Why would it fall through the floor?
The LHC creates 100,000 times stronger gravity then the earth in a confined space. Would the black hole not be confined in a small spot that is no larger then a speck of dust with temperatures colder then space. With nothing to feed from and an environment unlike anywhere else, would it ever survive for longer then the short burst...
Researcher Publishes Industrial Complex Hack
How long will it be before Google debuts its own Tonchidot augmented reality slice'o'experience on Android- this year, next?
Oh, you snarky developers!
As a quasi-libertarian, I blame the billions of dollars needed for base station hardware, fiber optic networks, and a nationwide salesforce for the... uh... high entry cost.

90% of people^ won't use a cell carrier that doesn't have nationwide coverage, so it's not like you can build these things on a shoestring. Witness the long slow rise of Cricket Wireless (http://www.mycricket.com), even though it offers flat rates without contracts.

^ Yes, I made up this number, but I'm sure it's not far off.
Spectacular fossil forests have been found in the coal mines of Illinois
I would suggest condensing Iterend's description down to two sentences.

Give me the benefit and then describe it - all in 30 words or less! Users have almost zero attention span ... capturing it is key!
I disagree. Because of my background as a programmer, it never even occurred to me to mock up websites using Photoshop when I started--it was 100% CSS+HTML, all the time. But, a few times I was designing something and had to to show a colleague a draft in a hurry, so I did a screenshot of the incomplete page, pasted into MS Paint, and embellished it there. When they made suggestions, I just went back into MS paint and re-arranged things again in a few seconds and resent. It was amazingly productive compared to writing all the code. And, I didn't even have layers--it was MS Paint!

After a few experiences like that, I switched to a hybrid, iterative approach where I would mock stuff a few aspects of the page in a real image editor and then code it when I found the correct look. It really saves a lot of time when I am doing anything that requires non-trivial CSS and HTML.

It saves time because I end up throwing away the majority of my designs after I see them--they look better in my head than they do on the screen. If I just did it in HTML+CSS then I'd waste more time just doing the coding and I've have less time to experiment with different looks.

The thing to keep in mind is that it isn't necessary to spend hours and hours getting everything (e.g. font anti-aliasing, color shades, spacing) pixel-perfect in Photoshop. You just need to get it good enough where you can tell that the design is going to work. Then you can code it up as a HTML+CSS mockup. No matter what you do, the Photoshop mock-up and the final version aren't going to look the same anyway (especially when you consider browser differences).
How Google News bot caused United Airlines to lose 1.14 billion in valuation
> Hell, if you're having trouble, just email me, and I'll give you a personalized pep talk. I can afford it. I type pretty fast. Plus your email will be really short.

I'm tempted to email him just to find out what Steve Yegge's idea of a "really short" email is.
Hehe, good one, but I think he means the email that the can't-typers send him will be "really short".
What's your definition of "not touch typing"? Do you use two fingers? Do you keep your fingers on the home row?
4. Companies in Boston exit plenty of times too. Equallogic just got bought by Dell for $1.4B. Avici went public; my friend's dad was a cofounder there, and cashed out his stock in 2000 right before the market tanked. Akamai is also public. Avid is public. CCBN was bought for $50M by Thompson Financial. My math teacher started a company and got bought out for a few decamillions after 3-4 years.

You just don't hear about the acquisitions & IPOs because they aren't consumer Internet companies. They happen though, and they're for just as much money - or sometimes more - than their SV equivalents.
I'm out, baby
First, I want to say thank you to each of you. Everyone in the Hacker News community has contributed to the creation of this incredible venue for exchanging ideas, and you deserve a lot of credit for it.

Friday will be my last day at my corporate job. In the past, I've mentioned that as soon as I'd saved up $15k, I was going to focus full-time on getting my startup off the ground. I recently achieved that goal:

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/315/random_pics/bank.PNG

Wish me luck.

-- Shawn
I'm curious: Why do you keep sending posts to your server every few minutes?
TC50: GoodGuide Shines Light On The “Goodness” Of Consumer Products
Accoridng to Mythical Man-Month average programmer produces 2000 LOC per year. Other data I've seen backs this up. Typing speed is not really a problem.
Thanks for your comment! In fact, every time our customers' footprints have gone over their monthly cost, we've paid for the full corresponding number of RECs. That clause is there to protect against gross abuse. For example, if a site consistently receives 20M hits per month (a custom tier) and signs up for a 5M hit per month package, we reserve the right to manage only the first 5M.
TechCrunch 50 Winner: FitBit
Does anyone else type on QWERTY but never from home row? I get 115wpm but with a disastrous 96% accuracy. The upside is much better access to the number keys and punctuation. I once tried to switch to Colemak, but never managed to completely switch over. I think this was because my muscle memory of QWERTY in 8 different positions was too powerful to unlearn.