skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just turned 35, and have a very similar story. One thing I've found that helps is to start talking about your ideas with others. Not only does it give you insight into how others perceive your ideas and potentially help improve the concept, but it also gives you a certain amount peer motivation from friends and family to follow up on your progress. If they won't naturally do this, ask them to ... tell em it'll help you stay motivated, and ask whether you can follow up in a few weeks/months/whatever to show them what you've accomplished.

Ultimately, the message I needed to get into my own head was that nobody was going to build my idea for me ... so if I wanted to see it as something more than a Photoshop mockup, I just needed to break it into pieces, and start knocking them down.
Beyond PhotoShop - Virtual Models for Clothing
How to Make Your Own Flash Game For Free
Want to make a flash game in very easy way and in unique attractive look?
Definitely see your points (and everyone else's) the app started out as a proof of concept and wanted to get some more feedback if there was a valid market.
> You don't actually need that though - there is a completely obvious way to write stuff without having to use that line.

Can you elaborate on that point? I thought that was the canonical way to do exactly that... http://docs.python.org/library/__main__.html. If there's an easier/less verbose method (pun not intended) I'd love to know about it.
Why Java, if JavaScript is so fast nowadays?

But I agree, no point to run it remotely.
I don't see what the advantage is for someone to put up front that they went to some vc's rival school or something equally prejudicial.
"it might be workable if they specialize in making e-commerce sites for a specific under-served niche with specialized needs?"

It's silly to assume that it's competitive therefore they have to carve a totally unique niche to win. There is always room for innovators and competitors if they can execute a good product.

New e-commerce platforms appear all the time and build profitable businesses.
Tell HN: Thanks
Just needed to say that as a noob here on HN, I am so very impressed with the help and support of the community as a whole. I've spent a ton of hours over the last month reading and searching for experiential advice - which I have found. I'll be reading and contributing as I can for a long time. The karma here is fabulous! Thank you.
I love ColourLovers because I'm not always the best at selecting a color palette. So Pictaculous looks pretty neat too. I thought it was only going to give me the top few color averages of the photo I submitted, but it appears to be giving me more than that. Nice.
Roche upbeat on Avastin in ovarian cancer 
Roche Holding AG the world's leader in oncology drugs struck an upbeat tone about approval prospects for its key drug Avastin in ovarian cancer ahead of an important industry meeting next month.
I don't think that node.js is doing either of those things. How does one quantify "sinking down the drain"? It's not zero-sum. How is Cloudkick writing services in javascript any worse or better than Cloudkick writing those services in python or java?

I think the real danger is people thinking they've learned everything there is to learn and closing their minds. Which includes telling people that "node.js is cancer". Node is letting people do all kinds of interesting things, and it isn't killing off anybody's favorite language.
Tons of red flags here, man. Talking about how you're an idea guy, insisting on a strict NDA, making grandiose claims with no evidence, expecting people to fly to you for this idea. Any software engineer worth their salt would have nothing to do with you based on this post. Sorry, but it's true.

in addition to being a software engineer, I'm an amateur musician and artist

...

I'm just a senior software engineer with an idea

In order for you to be anything to anyone who matters, you need to be more than a guy with an idea. That immediately puts you in the same bucket as most people, who have "great ideas" all the time.

"But mine is different!" No doubt. They all think that too.

But you're in luck: you're a freaking artist and software engineer.

BUILD A PROTOTYPE.

Actually, a huge red flag here is that this is "5 years in the making" and you don't mention anything that you've produced beyond the idea.

Shut up and build something, then go find someone to help you take it to the next level. And don't ask for an NDA, it just makes you look like an amateur.
Hah! As someone who is nearing their forties I find this Silicon Value obsession with youth quite interesting. I live in Ireland and I have never even been in the States, so my opinions should be taken with a pinch of salt :)

I know of plenty of successful "older" entrepreneurs here, even in IT. We don't have this cult of the under 25s here as much I think.

Perhaps VCs like under 25s because they are just easier to manipulate?
Or is it just another sign of a culture that is worryingly obsession with youth and staying young at any cost?
Really? They should be able to look at that code snippet plus performance results and say, "Oh, that's probably the result of cache hash collisions caused by the way the memory was allocated." That's harsh.

Edited to add: So you'd be ok with your next interviewer asking you to use the method of Frobenius to solve an ordinary differential equation, because, "hey, I had to learn that as part of my CS math prerequisite courses, so you should know it too, even though you're just interviewing for a web dev job?"
Pretty snarky comment, what have you invented?
You've got it exactly -- the more important thing, IMO, is systems "knowing" what you want, predicting your behavior, in a way that is completely effortless, transparent, and expected. I'm doing that now with my startup, using pre-scripted actions, but hope to see user-adaptive, learning systems (e.g. the Nest thermostat) find their way into everything.
I posted this after being really inspired by the HN post about John Carmack's .plan file[1], and then doing some research to discover what exactly a .plan file is.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3367230
Well, I work with DPI tools in the mobie world where carriers might want to rate-limit video sites or ban certain sites or charge more for some sites.

Can you describe in more detail how your equipment can reach line speed and what vendor/third party tools are used?
Fair enough, I can agree with that. This angle has been played to death anyway.
I'm regularly impressed with the mods over at /r/asks Jen e and how high they've been able to keep the SNR.
As an aside I just saw this a couple of days ago and while activity seems to be slow to non-existent this looks like an interesting project.

Webfinger - http://code.google.com/p/

Basically finger 2.0 for the web
I love HN. Totally understand what you're talking about.

After reading, give back to the community by commenting. In my personal experience, that's the best thing on HN.
Why Walking through a Doorway Makes You Forget
McKinsey client presentation gets nominated for Booker Prize
حافز اكمال البيانات
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=973997
Why the God particle is an accurate term
Who's Participating in CodeSprint 2? Week 2
Scribd is a Y combinator company.
I agree. The most benefit I got out of my computer science degree was not learning the computer science topics I was already interested in, as I was learning those on my own anyway. I got far more value out of being "forced" to learn about other things that I would not have thought I would have enjoyed, ranging from economics to Russian history to foreign languages.

Maybe I would have eventually studied those things on my own, but maybe not. And either way, it helped me to realize that there are lots of interesting things in the world well outside the realm of my favorite things.
Assessing a Company: Questions you need to ask in an Interview
Video: A bitter Steve Jobs trashes John Sculley
VC's are looking for home runs, not base hits. Younger people are more OK with big risk... The exception, of course, is older guys who have already sold a company (and thus, probably aren't looking for a base hit)...
Thanks! Just really wanted to add a bit context.
news.ycombinator.org ?
Show HN: Try out our real-world programming challenges
For CodeSprint 2, we decided to introduce Real World Problems: programming problems that our CodeSprint companies face in real life.

Real World Problems are messy, complicated, and infinitely variable. They require API calls, use of an arbitrary number of libraries, and a file structure that contains more than a single file upload. In short: Our existing code checking architecture is mostly useless. So we're writing a new one. Please help us test it.

beta.interviewstreet.com
What's changed is the definition of GPU. 15 years ago, the most programmability a GPU had was a few registers to switch between a handful of hardcoded modes of operation. For the past several years, GPUs have been something like 80% composed of Turing-complete processors that can run arbitrary software, and they've more recently gained features like a unified address space with the host CPU, and the ability to partition the array of vector processors to run more than one piece of code at the same time. These features are 100% irrelevant to realtime 3d rendering.

GPU architectures don't exactly resemble FPGAs when viewed up close, but for the right kind of problem, an application programmer can now deal with a GPU in the same manner as an FPGA. (In fact, with OpenCL, you can use the exact same APIs.)
Hong Kong has several vibrant, English-speaking startup/hacker communities where people are passionate about building stuff and making things work.

Some notable communities to checkout:

http://codeaholics.hk/ - Technology agnostic programming community

http://www.startupshk.com/ - A tight-knit startup community

http://boot.hk/ - A great gathering place for hackers and builders.

See you in Hong Kong!
Have you tried Valgrind's Cachegrind (http://valgrind.org/docs/manual/cg-manual.html) and found it inadequate?
Kitchen Oscilloscope
I don't know. The idea that you had the skill to do something amazing, but not the discipline to follow through seems to imply that you couldn't do it.

For example, say you see discipline and skill as the two ingredients need to do something amazing. It's easy to say "I had the skill, but not the discipline, I could have done it." But is that really any different than saying, "I had the discipline, but not the skill, I could have done it." Discipline is probably just as difficult as the raw development skills to master, yet it's really easy to convince ourselves that it's just a matter of 'doing it.'
I recommend rotating the pitchfork to make it look like a lambda.
Unless you use a strict doctype. http://stever.ca/web-design/centering-a-div-in-ie8-using-mar... I don't think text-align: center on the parent box is significantly different in principle: confusing until you know why it's being done that why and roughly how it works.

Personally I like negative margin better than text-align: center since the style is only applied to the box being centered rather than the parent box and the box itself, but surely this is a matter of preference or the design of the particular page in question.
That is what I get in Chrome when I tab to autocomplete "n". At some point I must have typed in "news.ycombinator.org" out of curiosity, and Chrome decided to favor it.
They don't need to know the exact cause, but they should certainly be able to look at that code and say, "well that's rather weird. my guess is cache weirdness". I don't think being able to identify the ballfield that the answer is in is too much to ask. Identifying that sort of problem is sophomore or maybe junior level stuff. Figuring out what exactly is causing it and therefore how to solve it I would consider bonus, and wouldn't expect it.

Differential equations was not a part of my CS curriculum, but I imagine it would be fair game for any engineer. I would not expect them to solve the answer for me on a whiteboard right there, but I don't know what the equivalent to "simply identify what the question is" would be in this case.
holy shit dude.. best of luck to you guys. Great story reflecting on 2011, and congrats with how far you've brought Buffer
So for the change log to actually inform you of any changes, you had to know what was in it before? Either I'm confused, or that's not a very helpful changelog.
Aww, damnit. It's down again. I really need to ditch Apache or learn how to not make it take down my 1.8 GB ram Linode instance.
It is next to impossible for me to focus on audio (spoken) only. If I need to listen to something it has to be video or I opt for a transcript instead. Just a random data point that audio without video can be of no value too.
From your link:

It is this environment in which the idiomatic “conditional script” stanza causes a script to run

The conditional script stanza is optional, and intended to make a .py file function as both a script and a module (i.e. be importable). To me, it's unclear why you would want to do that. The only thing you have to do to avoid using __main__ is not require any file to be both a script and a module/library. Then just put any entry-point code at the top level of whatever script invokes your program. Unfortunately the __main__ stanza is pretty widely used though.

On the topic of modules, there is a wrinkle in requiring __init__.py to be present in any library subdirectory that you want to be part of the namespace. It would be nice to have a more intuitive way for that.
Because we all now that no display is as optimized as an html div box... They are currently using crazy optimization techniques in browsers to make javascript-heavy pages have the level of badly-designed native apps.
Hong Kong is my favorite place in the world to live or work. If I were working on something other than computer security, I'd have a hard time not doing it there. I'm sure you will be very successful there.
This post inspired me to write a reply which I made into it's separate post at http://tumblr.sriramk.com/post/14419136146/on-carmack-and-cu...

Copy-pasted below

"John Carmack is one of my heroes in the tech world. Not because of his technical accomplishments and helping to create games that I’ve spent years of my life on. But for his single minded obsession with his craft after two decades. Every time he is on stage, he is so obviously in love with what he does that it is infectious.

That was one of my favorite things about Dave Cutler back at Microsoft.

Here’s this legendary figure pushing 70 years who has accomplished more things than most developers dream up. But he showed up at work every single day and made checkins every single day - including Dec 25th and Jan 1st, something he was proud of.

I was once at Microsoft campus late on a Sunday and walked past his office. Spotting the familiar blue hue from his office, I looked inside and saw him debugging something.

“Hey Dave,”, I said “Ever get bored of ntos and ntos/ke? You’ve been coding there for…for like 20 years now?”

ntos is the core part of the Windows NT source tree and ke is where the kernel code lives in. Where pretty much every source file would have a header with Cutler’s name on it and a created date in the 80s.

He turned slowly, looked me over. Obviously not very thrilled about this pipsqueak program manager interrupting him being in the ‘zone’. He then smiled and said. “I love this stuff. What else do you want me to do? Be on a boat somewhere?”

With that, he turned back to his debugger and went back to work.
"
صور عادل امام adel imam 
صور عادل امام adel imam
10 kinds of awesome.
Make sure you read the caveat I wrote as what counts as a "word" depends on the mode.
That article is a light on details...

Anyone got any specifics on the logistics of moving to HK and setting up?

How's the money flow over there? VC/angel funding space?
I absolutely agree with you. As crazy as it is, most people don't realize that news programs project the agenda of their corporate parents -- the media just "speaks the truth."
Lots of nice answers here. How about another:

You're both right. Variables x, y range over computations, and "x == y" is true when those computations yield the same value.

> What am I missing?

The fact that your statement does not contradict the one in the article.
The idea was that xhtml was supposed to work hand in hand with XSLT. Instead of HTML/CSS you would have XHTML/XSLT. You would process XML files with a turing-complete language to display nice styles. Every web site would be directly machine-readable. RSS would be completemy useless as they would be easy to extract from the raw XML.
I found the post interesting, that's why I submitted HN. I can't be blamed for other people upvoting it.

I didn't notice the errors but having people at HN showing me what is wrong helped me learn more about Haskell. I hope that pointing those errors helps make the post more robust, too.
An angel investor once shared candidly with me that if he were evaluating two teams competing in the same market, where one was young & inexperienced and the other was old & experienced, he would invest in the younger team.

His explanation was that building a startup is incredibly hard & time-consuming, and a vast majority of teams fail. A younger team would have a lower burn rate, be able to work all hours of the day to get things done (for better or worse), and be more likely to stay with the startup life after several failures.

An older team generally needs more of a salary for financial obligations (especially those with a family, mortgage, etc), wouldn't be able to work as many hours (especially those with a family), and might be able to survive a failure or two, then give up and go back to a FT job somewhere because of their already-established connections.

Whether you have the same mindset or not, this may be the mindset of many investors in Silicon Valley. And perhaps journalists & industry bloggers too, which would explain why the media here tends to emphasize younger cofounders.
CPU speed isn't a bottleneck anymore. These days improving caching, threading, and increasing the bus/memory speed have been the primary contributors to speeding up a computer. Once those bottlenecks close a bit you'll see those numbers begin to rise again.
With noscript, request policy and cookie blocking turned on, those have gotta be the biggest fonts I have seen on a webpage...
Perhaps it's just me, but this story has disappeared and doesn't show up at all any more. Was it removed from HN for some reason?
I noticed in your profile details popup you don’t distinguish universities by city. I happen to go to a university which shares its name with several other institutions worldwide though there’s no relation between any of them.

Could you include a city so I know that I’m selecting the correct university? Mine’s in Texas, the other one is in Ireland. I’d like to know which I’m choosing!
The article is from 2002, so it's entire line of reasoning is quite outdated.
What kind of genius are you: quick & dramatic or careful & quiet?
High level advice:
- If you want a place that's walking distance, stick to the lowered number streets in that area. The Mid-Market area (5th and Market to 9th and Market) is not so great at night. That's why SF has given tax breaks for companies to move there.

- SoMa is not too far a walk from there. It's all newer developments, so they tend to be more expensive, especially as you move closer to the Caltrain station. But they're nicer apartments with amenities like an in building gym and if you're near Caltrain you can get down to San Mateo or Palo Alto on a train. Palo Alto + Stanford may be a fun day trip.

- You're very close to bart and muni there, so really the entire city and east bay are only a 15 minute commute away. If you're in the city for a summer, the Mission and Dolores Park area are awesome if you can snag a place. Great character, cheap food, some higher end food, and a neighborhood feel to lots of it.
The link to Calude's paper in the article is broken, it is this: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~cristian/Calude361_370.pdf
What they're looking for is people with under-developed bullsh*t detectors.

I suspect the reason IT applications are sometimes being pioneered by younger people has more to do with immersion in the technology from an early age that can provide novel insights into how people will use technology. But as the years roll on and the low-hanging fruit (like facebook) is picked clean, the young folks are going to find it increasingly harder to uncover problems to be solved.
Directy democracy fails for exactly the reasons you have stated, yet those reasons all have one source: complexity.

The system of law was designed not by engineers, but by law makers who had no concept of system architecture and runaway complexity. They employed an imprecise language to construct an unstable structure which requires continuous patching and propping, resulting in a quagmire of legislation, open to manipulation due to its inherently contradictory and subjective foundation.

This problem can only be solved by proper system design, but it requires a hard reset of extant legislation. Once the law is written such that every literate citizen can understand it, we will have arrived at direct democracy.
http://code.google.com/p/webfinger/
I would guess the concerns are less about corrupting results, and more about leakage power and switching speed. If you have a very leaky pulldown, switching to "1" is going to be slower.
That is a horrible way to play baseball.
Nice! You know what would be cool too? If you could also suggest available Twitter names that are derivatives of the name I type in.
Could people from the Hong Kong startup community please comment on HK vs Shanghai for doing a startup?

I've lived in HK during my student exchange and loved every minute of it - I also have an employee working from Hong Kong.

At some point I'll set up teams to target Asian markets with China as the most important one.

What are pro's and con's of HK vs Shanghai?

Edit: Thanks for all the answers! I really want to go back to HK now :)
VCs desperately need the home runs because they throw money at so many losing ventures. If they were better at picking successful businesses, they wouldn't have to rely so much on the home runs to make a profit.
Knuth comes across as living in a bit of denial here... Sure the frequency speedups were much nicer, but faced with hardware limits that make this impossible

It's easier to say "the hardware guys are dropping the ball" than to acknowledge silly things like "Physics".

Now, he could try to argue that hardware should be responsible for paralleling things under the covers, and that would be a bit more reasonable- though I would still have to disagree. CS folks are the ones supposed to be discovering algorithms; find them, and have the hardware guys stick them in once they are known.
It always says 'Yep' for me :/

Edit: Ah, backend returns HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable
.
Can you provide any advice on how to protect oneself?
It says "Yep" for my handle...

Are you hitting https://twitter.com/users/username_available?username=[X]? I wonder if that private API is rate limited.
Apparently all 3 of Twitter names I own and use are still available :/ I'm thinking that now you're up you should bug check it.
The Second-System Effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
Yeah, we are kinda splitting hairs here, but strictly speaking, 'class' is reserved word in JS. It will become a keywords when they start using it. The link you provided does make this distinction: reserved as future keywords.
I fail to see why people bring this up as an argument to legalize drugs. This is really only an argument to change the penalty so you don't go to jail.
PHP for All the Things
garrrh. thanks everyone - not sure why it's returning "yep". Looking into this now.
perhaps a blog entry on how to make a catchy HN title would be good too ;)
not quite working but it does seem like a fun sunday morning project.
Args, opts, params
"It always says 'Yep' for me :/" true.