skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At work here we have separate branches for each major feature release under parallel development. There's another branch for any high-priority fixes going into production outside of the normal release schedule. There's a lot of merging going on cross-branch and git would make this whole structure much easier to follow. We're using CVS and honestly it's a huge pain for our workflow.
Would you trust/encourage a guy who shoots a horse in the head just to see something on the bottom of the sea floor eat it?
Unfortunately, OS X can make it a bit too easy. Until I gave her instruction otherwise, my wife downloaded apps like MSN Messenger, opened the DMG and then ran the app direct from there! So she had all these installation DMGs open so she could run her apps.

My father (who tried OS X after being a Linux user for some time) did the same. It's really not obvious what you're meant to do unless the DMG has the instructions in clear sight (which some developers do). I had a similar confusion when I first switched to the Mac five years ago.
killing the horse just to get tourists see sharks and other sea predators is imo stupid and unelegant
New state of matter discovered: "quasi-three- dimensional electron crystal"
Start a side project -- just get it out the door, projects have a way of morphing into glorious things that become what you want them to be and provide happiness. :)

Read this for more inspiration: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=282158
"The specifics of the attack haven’t been released and officials say the president’s bank could face sanctions if it’s found their security procedures, or lack thereof, contributed to the hacker’s attack."

I love how when this happens to the French President the bank might face sanctions for their lousy security. But if it happens to your average user, you're on your own to detect the theft and re-assemble your life.
ASK HN: Who would you use to host a Dot Net Nuke site?
My boss informed that we have to get scalable web hosting for a Dot Net Nuke powered social networking site. I've always used Media Temple or Dreamhost and my company uses Hostmonster. (We're a small integrated marketing firm in Kansas City.)

None of these options will work because they don't support .asp. Who would you use?
I think it's much easier to discuss "talent" if you ignore physical attributes. Not just because it avoids using the word "talent" too broadly, but because physical attributes only apply in a very limited number of professions.
Totally second this. Find your local hubs for entrepreneurs, tech people, inquiring minds etc, and get involved. You don't need to be hung up on the concept of having your own Big Idea, and it's great that you aren't. There are plenty of startups out there who would welcome someone like you - I know I would, if I was in the right country. Not sure of the situation in Dallas but here in the UK hanging around universities is a good way to meet people with ideas but little practical experience.

Learning is great too. As others have said, if you find an itch to scratch, you might end up working on an idea without even realising you've had one.
jerry is probably incorporating the same philosophy that is highly regarded at apple, google and by many ui designers

Still, seems like bad timing for Jerry to demonstrate his highly-regarded design philosophies. YHOO ain't AAPL or GOOG.
Good point: "But statups require a special kind of creativity: disruptive innovation. And, as the commenter rightly points out, this is not really a matter of efficiency. By the standard of "customer value," most innovation-seeking experiments are waste. Lean startups operate by a different standard."
That's true in the US, but sports has barely any importance at all in British universities (and perhaps applies to the EU generally). Okay, we all know about the Oxford vs Cambridge boat race, but beyond that, there's no public exposure to university sports.

I think the focus on sports at US colleges says a lot about the US, rather than universities or the education system in general.
This may open up some interesting opportunities for app developers.
The rackspace cloud event
Work on building up your personal brand equity. In less buzzwordy terms, build up your social network, become known for your opinions, and develop an audience of some sort. Gary Vaynerchuk's videos are worth watching on this topic - http://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/

I follow a lot of people on Twitter who aren't working on a specific idea right now, but when they do, you can bet I'll be checking it out and cheerleading for them! The same applies for those following me. Become known, get us to follow you and enjoy what you have to say, and then when you DO get "that big idea" you'll actually have some users and publicity out of the gate :)

With that said, if you /do/ have a Twitter account or whatever, link us up! But your blog only seems to have one post..
Horizontal drop down for primary navigation elements seems most intuitive to users in my experience. I think the most important thing is to keep common elements together and enduring - primary navigation elements (home, news, etc) and account option (sign in/out, edit, etc) should be separated and distinct, but they should always be visible and in the same place.
Please not another advocate that uses CSSZenGarden.com as a reference. It's a great 'proof of concept' but it no longer impresses me or means anything in the real world.

Show me YOUR site, and how it can be completely changed with just a flick of the CSS switch and I'll be impressed.

Most (arguably all) CSS designs are built to accomplish 1 layout and 1 design.

Now, for more simple changes, like fonts, colors, and small layout changes CSS is the tits.
Most people in Turkey are doing ok. It's just that the bottom level is larger than it is in the US, and there is less support. A person who is much above average in the US can find a way out. Over here, it takes really exceptional qualities.
Clive Howard & Jeremy Baines on AlertThingy V2
I'm in the same position (good skills, adequate cash, no job - but no idea or cofounder) and am thinking of resolving it by either:

1.) Getting a job at a big Silicon Valley tech company or

2.) Getting a job at a YCombinator startup.

One thing I learned from my past failed startup is that ideas come from interacting with the world around you, they don't spring fully formed from your head. Either one of the above options puts me in contact with more potential ideas - I'd meet more people at a big tech company, but I'd do more things at the YC startup. They'd also get me out of the house and into an environment with lots of people interested in startups.

I've also found that it's really hard to build a network or feel out a cofounder once you already have an idea that you're passionate about. That relationship has to be forged under a low-stress situation, and then you jump into the fire with them. ;-) So now may be a good time to work on that, if the environment allows (I've heard it's a really terrible place to start a tech company).
There's also a five minute walkthrough for iPhone users here:

http://www.mobileorchard.com/a-5-minute-walkthrough-of-andro...

Engadget also has a review:

http://www.engadget.com/2008/10/16/t-mobile-g1-review/
Browser standards, like traditional industry (cars for example) move pretty slowly. To say that somehow we're going to suddenly leapfrog this tech after years of slow progress would be unlikely.
Christ, you grammar nerd-nazis. This is why people don't like geeks. Did you ever sort out if Kirk or Picard was better, too? Did you READ the letter?!

Jerry Yang isn't in the business of doing whatever pleases you and as evidenced by the content of the letter, there are bigger things to worry about.
NSA@home: hash-cracking hardware
Interesting. I supposed I'm just spoiled by Northern California weather!

In any case I don't mean to suggest that traffic lights should be only different shapes but rather that shapes be used in combination with colors. I feel like it would be an easy transition to make as the shapes would be a supplement to the existing system and thus traffic signals can be changed gradually.

The article's idea of making the green light blue would certainly help me but it does nothing for people who are completely colorblind and present the problem of transitioning a standard.
+1 for this. Just start building something. It could be a forum, a blogging application or a project management tool. Just start to build it and the idea will come to you. In the meantime you will improve your Django skills even more.
Oh, I only wish I was still running my style switcher.

11 totally different layouts, all using the same mark-up, all with their own unique stylesheet.

Just because some people find it hard, doesn't mean it can't be done.
As I look at trying to start something myself, it's not the lack of "good" ideas that ever worries me (although if you tell someone you're interested in starting a company the first question they always ask is "what's your idea?"), it's finding the right partner or "someone else to work with" that seems to be the biggest obstacle. I'd rather have no ideas and a determined partner to work with, than 100 greate ideas and no way to execute.

To that point, I have one burning idea right now but have not landed on the right partner. Any interest in talking about it?
7 Real Reasons Why iPhone Is a Smash Hit
If for no other reason, so that the blame on who gets axed goes to the consultants instead of who really made the decisions (the managers)
The Most Controversial Tax Codes
There are many many great people in industries/services that just haven't led them to be technologists. They might have everything you don't - which is key to building a great team.
I agree with the parent. It sounds to me like you might be in a rut. Check out Time Magazine's 100 Best Novels Since 1923 and borrow a few from your local library. Giving your brain a break from tech grind might help you see things from new perspectives and give your neurons room to fire up some interesting ideas.
You can branch and merge easily with SVN, too. What does Git add, other than the ability to do it locally?
If someone finally makes a worthwhile netbook, which I'm assuming Apple's would be, I would think the days of the Kindle and all the other high-priced, two toned, walled, "reading only" devices are very limited.
Don't fret about finding The Big Idea (or even not having a List of Possible Big Ideas to choose from).

I'm sure you get small ideas now and then. When you do, don't think about them too much, just jump on them, especially if they're small enough to finish in a couple of days. Something Bigger might grow out of one of them. If not, hey, it still beats spending that time watching TV or reading Reddit.

You must have at least one friend who thinks sort of the same way you do. Bounce silly ideas off them. Create a mindset - for both yourself and for them - where you look at everyday activities and events through the perspective of "what can I do with this?", and chat with them about ideas regularly.
Enjoy this phase! Idea generation can be a lot of fun. Get some books to stimulate. I've gotten a lot of mileage from "A Whack On The Side Of The Head" and "Creativity" (Csikszentmihalyi). Watch some TED talks. Go to your local unconferences and meet people and see what they're working on. Team up on those connections.

Share your ideas as they come. Record everything that comes to mind. Get feedback. Iterate.

Meanwhile, you can be educating yourself on the business side of things: starting a business, people/listening skills, presenting, marketing, etc. You're already here; that's a pretty good start. But books like "The Art Of The Start", "Founders At Work", and the Seth Godin variety are worth their weight in gold.
Posterous launches easy post tagging via email
To a large extent, OS X gives the best of both worlds.

From the command line, things look very much like you describe (but not exactly, Apple often has different conventions and names for things than Linux, say). That application you just downloaded is just a directory with a ".app" extension. You can browse its directory structure and find all of the resources for the application, all residing in their conventional locations.

But using the Finder, you just see the application's icon. If you double click it, it launches.

This is just one of the ways that Apple manages to have Unix underneath, but not expose it to users who don't want to care that it's there.
How Can Facebook Help Apps Grow Again? Make It Easier For People To Find Them
Making sweeping generalizations from a few events is also unhealthy and dangerous.
Very handy. It's hard to keep up with the posterous guys.
a) Go work for another startup with a great team.

b) Do some contracting. This will help you meet people and get your first taste of the business world. Learn to sell yourself, it should be much easier than selling any product. You also learn how to manage expectations, people and products.

c) Start making products. They don't have to be big, be groundbreaking, but start making things and learn to make things well. Probably the first few things you will make won't turn out how you would like and you will learn some valuable lessons.

d) Hopefully along the way, meet some other people who you can talk to and possibly work with. Sometimes you get lucky here, but you have to get that ball rolling.

e) Along the way you will find something you are passionate about building. Build it.
A Gathering of Boston Tech Like It's 1997 [tech geek meetup, this Friday]
How about doing something pointless but interesting. For example, a self aware web app.

Anyways, I have a list of about 100 ideas, so here are two:

* A generic API to access bank data from banks all over the world
* A site where one can list all the people that one hates, and what one will do to them when one finally gets rich enough/powerful enough etc.

Just make something silly and small.
This is a great post. It's nice to know there are some real advantages against big companies during the startup phase.
so easy I almost don't understand
Wrote a post about this a month back:

http://www.graduatedtaste.com/2008/09/12/lists-of-successful...
SWFupload, flash player 10: file uploads broken
Yes, another advocate of CSS Zen Garden. Its the best available example to display the power of stylesheets.

Here is my site: http://www.bradjasper.com/

As you can see, even though the header is presented first the the stories are all first in the source. This touches on my SEO point earlier.

Show me YOUR site, and how it can be completely changed with just a flick of the CSS switch and I'll be impressed.

Let's switch the sidebar from the right to the left.

#inner { float: left }

#sidebar { float: right }

Granted that's not completely changed, but its enough of a change to show the effect I'm going for.
Startup Turns CO2 Into Fuel
Either this is nothing special or I just hang around a weird crowd. I know a some guys that made three submarines, and they go to 1500 feet. The biggest one is the largest amateur submarine in the world. See pictures here: http://www.submarines.dk/

They are currently working on commercial spaceflight: The goal is to make a rocket that will get one person suborbital but weightless and back down. They expect to do it within a couple of years. They just had their first public motor test, you can see a clip here: http://ekstrabladet.dk/nationentv/klip/?clipid=17454&cli... . (links are in Danish)

And they're just a couple of guys with no money to speak off, but they are crazy and they believe they can do it.

So do I.
Basic finance concepts.
Off the top of my head, you could make a nationwide collaborative blog for teachers/professors to voice their opinions and/or publish short educational pages. get some sponsors for it and funnel the money back into some kinda foundation/fund for the education community.

like a techcrunch for teachers, TeachCrunch? O_o
It's crazy how fanatic people are about sports. I know in Europe there are gangs that kill each other based on what soccer team they support. Is this just because we can't go out and make war on the neigboring village anymore?
What they were doing may seem weird, but it's not really technically wrong to do. The only real downside is the resources wasted on keeping the disk mounted.
G1 'GPhone' Launch Fervor? Sure, There Are Lines, But Nothing Like The iPhone
No, I would definitely oppose a licensing system for software engineers similar to the one for doctors and attorneys. Not because it's a terrible idea in theory, but because I'm positive the implementation would be so bad that it would be worse than no licensing.

But I'm not advocating special protections for US based software developers. I just think that the US government has gone out of it's way to specifically expose US scientists and engineers (and related high tech occupations) to foreign competition. I'd be satisfied if the US government simply stopped doing active harm to this profession and treated it like any other unregulated profession (ie., immigrants are free to go into it as they are free to go into any other profession - but no special visas for this specific field).

Actually, I'm not even completely opposed to some specific targeting of high tech. Because high tech tends to be a wealth generating field, it might make sense to target tech workers. Like I said earlier, I would support a moderate number of visas under terms that preserve the freedom and mobility of the engineer (ie., no indentured servitude).

But what we have right now - ie., hundreds of thousands of visas under indentured conditions with almost no enforcement of the paltry protections that are there? It goes way too far, and ends up a creating a deterrence for US students who might have otherwise gone into engineering.

I also think that this threatens the long-term viability of high tech in the US. We do need a healthy flow of our own citizens (and by this, I mean people who grew up in the US and came through our educational system) into high tech occupations. Otherwise, we will, guaranteed, one day lose our high tech industry in this country.

So I'd say - yes, supplement our work force with judicious use of visas, but also be very careful to ensure that we are not bringing in so much competition that US citizens are deterred.

I'd say between 50-60K visas a year would be fine. I'd also point out that there probably aren't that many talented foreign nationals out there every year - much of the overflow is really just a way to drive labor costs down in run-of-the-mill crap programming jobs (which is why most of these visas go to foreign outsourcing firms, not highly innovative positions at google or microsoft).
Shutting Down My Blog - A response to Wired's "Kill Your Blog" article
Lets Go Deep - Major League Baseball Playoff Recap
Speaking of ideas, am I the only one that thinks phpBB sucks? And it powers so many of the forums out there.
I second the trip advice. Do it on the cheap too (backpacking / developing nations) in order to stretch your budget and therefore time off. Take your laptop and spend a set number of hours everyday learning / working on the tech stuff you want. Relax the rest of the time and get the creative juices flowing.
Cloud Computing Price War to come?
Banks make money lending money to you and me. This is not necessarily money they have themselves, but borrow on the interbank market. How much they can borrow depends on what kind of collateral they can put up, and whether other banks trust them to pay it back. If their stock price goes down significantly their collateral shrinks (they are "officially" worth less and thus have less collateral) and it becomes harder for them to borrow from other banks. This starts a vicious circle where other banks start questioning their ability to pay back. When the bank runs out of money (liquidity) it goes bankrupt.

Simple.. :-)
We have a ticket system (which is just a basic Rails app I built). When a ticket is submitted, the customer gets an auto-reply that we're looking into it. The ticket is emailed to almost every staff member (6 of 8 people). An initial reply is usually submitted within 30 minutes (not necessarily a resolution). Tickets become a thread of messages until it is resolved.

I'm a big fan of a distributed/threaded system like this. I don't like direct emails for support.

BTW, if anyone is interested in using our ticket system, let me know–I could open source it on GitHub or something.
New York VC Slim Pickings
> OS X already works this way.

Or almost works, I'd say; dragging an application to the Trash does not completely remove the application: the preferences and support files that the application has thrown into (user) global directories are still there, and in fact (besides third party apps which do this task) there is no clear interface to remove them or to know where the application put files in the first place; you have to comb manually through your ~/Library.
Putting files in folders is a metaphor left over from the way we had to organize physical documents, because we couldn't do any better. The key is to provide easy search and flexible views on top of the data/files users have so they can easily find what they need, not to force users into organizing their files into neat little folders.

OS X gets most of this right because it doesn't care where you put your apps (although /Applications is recommended), applications aren't folder you can mess around with, they are wrapped in a logical package you can move or doubleclick on to open. Spotlight makes it easy to find anything on your computer and most applications are optimized around searching or looking at your data from different views (iTunes, iPhoto, Mail, etc).
Thoughts on European Start Ups
Lots of good comments suggesting you focus on what you love and are passionate about.

But also ask what you hate; what makes you mad? It could be a little thing (e.g. why can't I browse the library of the DVD rental places in my neighborhood?) Is there a computing solution to that maddening thing?
Do it now! You're young, you're flush with cash, and you have no responsibilities. This is the perfect time to travel. If you don't go now, you will never go.

Ignore all other advice in this thread. Technology is boring. You probably aren't going to want to tell your grandchildren about the web2.0 sheep-thrower that you built when you were 25, but you'll definitely want to tell them about the time that you hiked through the Andes, rode a camel in India, and slept with a beautiful girl in Greece.

Travel! Travel now!! Go go go go go!
The versioned share library is interesting. But another concern to "non-installation" method is that some "lazy" programmers failed to keep the library they use update. When there are security issues around the library, usually, the developer of the library will quickly come up with a hot-fix. But Other applications which use the library under their own local folder still expose the potential security backdoor to third party.
50 Tips for An Awesome Google Chrome Experience
Google Chrome is a new browser from search engine giant Google. It offers a lightweight Internet experience and plenty of integration with Google services. There are a number of ways to enhance this experience, and this article has detailed 50 of them here.
I have to admit, until now I hadn't heard of Pixish ... and I work in the photo/imaging space.

Out of curiousity, is Derek on HN? What is to become of Pixish's assets and IP? I know people that could leverage this platform.
Is there any way to prevent pasting rich text? I can strip out the tag soup, but it would be great to have the option to only allow pasting plain text.
looked better on my iPhone than on my laptop