skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just got back from two days of mentoring people at a startup event (Lean Startup Machine), and I think Graham has it pretty much right.

The way I see it happen is that a lot of people start out with products they want to build. They would like to sit down and start coding, because that's the thing they know how to do. The t-shirt we mentors wear says "GET OUT OF THE BUILDING" because people are extremely resistant to the shlepping involved in talking to real people and seeing what problems they actually have.

I'm sure it's true, as you suggest, that some people didn't build Stripe because it was a project they really weren't competent to build. But I'm equally sure that plenty of people who could create something great jump into building a particular product because it seems safe and familiar, and then make themselves a little cocoon that insulates them from the fact that nobody is out there saying, "Gosh, I really need another recipe site." Until the money runs out, anyhow.
I had a paragraph about this in an earlier draft, but I took it out because it was only half true and the true half seemed obvious. The obvious half is that one man's schlep is another man's interesting problem, and that once the company gets going you can hire experts in each of the schleps you need to deal with.

But not all the schleps a company undertakes are schleps simply in virtue of not being someone's specialty. You have to satisfy users' needs to make a successful company, and it is very unlikely that the stuff you have to do to satisfy users' needs also happens to be exactly what you'd most like to work on, even if you're the specialist in that problem.
> Another comment proposed a theater mode, and maybe that should mean "no noise whatsoever for the next N hours, warn me if it means deferring an alarm".

It's called off. Hold the top button and the home button and you'll get a screen that lets you power off the iphone completely. To turn the phone back on just press and hold the top button for a few seconds. :)
Honestly, video discovery isn't a problem for me. I find videos through facebook, reddit, hacker news, etc. I doubt I would ever use a standalone video discovery app, but who knows? :)
"The hacker says all the data was taken from Indian government servers."

But hey, we can trust the supreme competence of the bureaucracy with our secrets.
I bet they rewrite their code every year… -.-
> Most every startup will start in the cloud

And yet the poll does not bear that out. The real cost of starting in "the cloud" is often very high -- 3x the cost of a VPS or more -- and you can handle an awful lot of traffic on a 512MB VPS.
How is the quality of videos you find?
Wouldn't be great if a user(maybe you) who discovers awesome 'cat' videos daily and shares the list with friends? This lists can be updated. People who follow this list,discovers videos with your help. A expert on a 'topic' would enable his/her followers to discover new videos.
My problem with Dropbox's prospects to become a multi-billion dollar enterprise, in a nutshell:

I use Dropbox on multiple Macs and across multiple iOS devices, for a not-insignificant variety of use cases. I have never paid Dropbox a dollar.
Brilliant! It'd be nice to provide an index of all companies profiled.
I can sort any search by popularity, and I can subscribe to users that often post good videos and see both the videos and what they're liking and commenting on. YouTube already has user-created playlists too, completely searchable and discoverable by anyone.

When I'm watching YouTube on my Google TV box, it even suggests playlists for me. I don't know where they come from, but somewhere YouTube is providing them -- everything from "trending videos" to "animals eating cookies".

YouTube really has this handled -- I would not use the service you're describing.

If I'm really bored and have to find some vetted videos, I'd go to http://www.reddit.com/domain/youtube.com/
Yea, when you install any SSL certificate, don't forget the intermediate certs!
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It's a better way to phrase it, certainly, but that wasn't my question. I've heard reporters use the original phrasing (i.e. "threatened Saturday"), so I consider it correct, just with incorrect punctuation. I was trying to figure out what the proper punctuation would be without changing the words.

This is part of a more general problem I have with being able to write the way I speak. I don't think I have terrible grammar when writing something relatively formal, in a "written tone" rather than a "spoken tone", but when I make comments on reddit or HN, I've noticed I have a general inability to also make my writing grammatically correct. I also use a lot of parentheses, because I tend to talk in tangents, and that's the only way I can really write it that makes sense.

It was an intellectual curiosity, nothing more.
I'm currently deploying to Heroku during development and will switch to a VPS again as soon as the Heroku free plan isn't sufficient anymore or I go into production.

I don't use dedicated servers. Too much work for too little reward.

My choices for the german readers here:

https://www.jiffybox.de/ - cheap scalable(!) VPS, nice UI, easy cloning of existing "boxes", backups, etc.

https://www.hetzner.de/ - cheap dedicated, low-end VPS, etc.
Dropbox already has a platform (it's API). You can already save directly to your Dropbox from a variety of sites. Still, not a whole bunch of folks use this functionality.
Yes it's a problem! There are slews of videos that aren't discoverable because the person who uploaded the video didn't submit enough or the right content in the title, tags, description and so on. The search fails to account for content within the video, and phrases and terms the author couldn't think of or was inept for whatever reason to add. Using only one tag, a nondescript title and a description that vaguely says "My dog and I". As a result so few videos are searchable for what is otherwise a common phrase. Maybe if the users could add tags or categories themselves to a video for the community, or common terms and phrases within comments or closed captioned could be contributed to the search.

As a side note, I'm often frustrated as a designer when I search for something stylistic and hardly anything shows up, such as "Black and White", when we all know there's plenty of B&W content.
Photo shoot Claire Rae 2012 calendar poster
> do you also intend to non-tacitly reject the claim that "online piracy" is a thing that subjects content producers to harm?

I would say that I would examine this claim under the new, more correct perspective rather than reject it. "Harm" is a relative notion. The baseline state against which the situation is be measured is that all information by default should be in the public domain. The gains that authors get from copyrights are a grant, not an entitlement, to encourage them to produce. So the "harm" is that the grant is (perhaps) smaller than it would by under a more aggressive enforcement regime.

The real test ought to be: is the grant large enough to serve the purpose, i.e. to encourage people to produce creative works? The answer at the moment seems to be manifestly that it is. I would challenge you to find even a single example of a creative work that might have been produced but wasn't because of fear of piracy.
> In 30 years: "Indexing all of the individual web pages in the world used to be a tough challenge."

Eh, that needs qualification to make sense. Just crawling and trivially tokenizing the web counts as "indexing all the individual web pages" but that's never been such a monstrous task.

Having results fresh to-the-day/hour/minute is a better example of something that will probably be looked at is child's play even though that's a very new, very computationally expensive development in search.
I respect PG very much. His past successes, YC, and his essays are great. He's not infallible though and I'm glad someone had the balls not just to put their disagreement in writing but to post it here on HN too. The author makes some good points and if the Schlep Blindness essay was written by anyone else there wouldn't be such a knee-jerk reaction to come to his defense like there is here. This community pays a lot of lip service to being the best, the brightest, critical and independent thinkers but then we all end up looking like hypocrites in situations just like this one. While there's no doubt that PG is am exceptional person I really think his celebrity and a ton of groupthink influences our interpretation of what PG says and how we react when someone doesn't fall in line to compliment him or do anything but disagree with what he says. I also shouldn't have to litter my opinion here with qualifications about how I think PG is great but without doing so I'll probably get bullied into submission via downvotes and various snarky comments. When the author of this article pointed out that the PG essay was basically telling us what we already knew while tricking us into thinking it were so profound the lightbulb went off in my head that inspired this. Anyway, we should all take what PG says like something any mere mortal would come up with. Some of its good, some not as good. Putting him on a pedestal impedes pour ability to think critically about the content of the writing and let it pass as high quality no matter what.
Everything you described with regards to your contacts lists I've already been doing with Google Contacts (work contacts, shared contacts with wife, etc).

My Android phone lets me easily sort and categorize my contacts, and only see what I want to (while keeping all of the data I still may want to get to in the background).

Why is this a job for Dropbox again?
> The prospect of being bankrupted by a civil suit or thrown in prison is enough to stop most people.

Yes, but... if you're good enough to be hired by these companies, leaking source code without being traced isn't going to be hard for you. I've thought about this before and I'm actually surprised it doesn't happen more often.
The Second Way To Skin A Cat | Technical Support Is At The Deli
Interesting. Are there or were there any key articles or other resources (github projects) that helped you determine your setup? How did you learn this? Should people follow https://github.com/Pewpewarrows ?
Python's whitespace requirements tend to make it clearer to read...

What projects have you worked on such that consistency of indentation was at all a meaningful factor to maintenance? I worry more about duplication and near duplication, testing efficacy, proper factoring, symbol naming, effective error handling, the possibility of fencepost errors, and clarity of intent.
Schumer is a PIPA sponsor:

http://www.reddit.com/r/1red1bluekick2/comments/nuyta/list_o...
If you're working at these companies you also know they have lots of people like you who will be working to track down any trace of who leaked the code. Are you willing to risk going to prison then being legally banned from touching a PC when you get out?
... the preponderance of features means it takes a long time for new contributors to get up to speed.

What projects have you worked on that language features are a greater barrier to effective contribution than a deep understanding of the problem domain, adherence to project coding standards, and design principles of the code base?

You can look up language features in the manual.
"By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will be." (Genesis 3:19)
I had a decent spell checker on my Apple //c - 128K RAM (64K commonly usable) and had to fit on 140KB floppy. While slow it worked better than about 10 years of MS Word.
The problem may be that it would only be scalable within Urban areas. Often on Craigslist I'm faced with the problem that I can't post to specific communities or locale's within a city such as Westside, downtown, or a housing development.
My life is much better with my Google TV box (Logitech Revue).

I watch more Netflix.

I watch more regular TV. The "TV & Movies" app gives me a Netflix-style list of movie/show covers arranged by genre... based on what's currently playing right now. The search button lets me type a few letters of a show I know is on now and quickly switch to its channel. I could never remember all the 3 digit channel numbers before.

I watch more YouTube because the app is so easy to use, it's got a little button that tells it to only show me HD videos in the results, videos almost never buffer unlike on a PC, and I can't tell the difference between a 1080p YouTube video and live HD TV.

It makes any TV I plug into it an Android device. Android Market and all. I use a couple apps regularly.

It eliminates 3 remote controls. The Revue can power on and off my TV, AV system and set top box... plus do every other function on their remotes, down to digging through settings menus -- all the intelligence of Logitech Harmony devices that cost more than the Revue does. It saves me time and money -- don't have to press "power" 3 times to turn everything off when I leave a room.

I want one for every TV in my house. A TV without Google TV feels dumb now.
My phone rings the alarm even if the phone is turned off. That makes sense to me, I turn my phone off at night.
Is it possible to sign object code (.exe , .dll etc) with any SSL certificate that we buy ? or does this have to be mentioned clearly in the list of features of SSL certificate..
Hackers: Full Norton Antivirus code to be released on Tuesday
vp-tree. Developed in the 90th.
hey thanks. i have almost built the platform! it sounds like what you sayl
The fundamental problem here is that libcrystalball doesn't exist yet: sometimes you want mute to mute the alarms (in concerts, though why would you need an alarm there) and sometimes you need mute to not affect alarms (when getting up).

As far as I can see, there's no way to reliably detect the situation at alarm time. Less and less as the time between setting mute and the alarm getting off increases.

Warning the user when turning on mute doesn't help either because for one the mute switch on the iPhone can be operated blindly because the phone wibrates when you mute it, so usually you'd not look at the phone to mute it.

And even if you did check its display and it did show that warning: the warning is totally useless for you most of the time (i.e before going to sleep), so that you will quickly be conditioned to ignore it - just like the security warnings in current OSes.

Or you are like me and have your phone muted for the majority of the time. Showing me that warning two weeks before the concert wouldn't help at all.

No. I believe that the current design which optimizes for the common case (not sleeping through the alarm) is fine. Just be mindful of this feature and check the alarms before the concert starts, or if you can at all afford it, just turn off the phone completely.

The hurdle of turning it off is as big as the hurdle of remembering to correctly set a three-state mute feature, but the current two-state one with haptic feedback has the huge advantage of simplicity.
Wait, are there programming languages where as a codebase grows, it doesn't get more complex?

I've worked on reasonably large codebases in Perl, C, C++, Java, and Modula-II, and I'd say that in all cases, as the codebase grew, it got more complex and harder to contribute to.
> My problem with Dropbox's prospects to become a multi-billion dollar enterprise, in a nutshell:

> I use Dropbox on multiple Macs and across multiple iOS devices, for a not-insignificant variety of use cases. I have never paid Dropbox a dollar.

Have you ever paid Google a dollar?
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I did not get a good feeling about StartSSL when I tried getting a free cert. First, as many have pointed out, the web site experience is miserable.

Second, I just got a "Error 107 (net::ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR): SSL protocol error." at https://auth.startssl.com

For a product that is supposed to be confidence inspiring, StartSSL is the opposite.
Yeah it pisses me off. He admits and clarifies that what we say he understands but still goes on the side of the RIAA.
Why Facebook's Data Sharing Matters
Some may say something is lost and resources wasted - taken for granted as we now brute force our way through such problems. Surely going backwards?

I think it is progress: Yes, we can brute force today through the problems that were a feat a decade or two ago. But: Not having to solve those problems frees a lot of time. Time that can be spent on problems that are a major feat today.
The two top-rated entries in the HN comments for PG's essay are disagreements, both stating that the essay is flawed. I'm not so sure the groupthink is really that bad here on HN.
thanks for your insight.im talking like twitter for videos.
Now, how do we convince this guy to buy T-Mobil?
Maybe at a bar or restaurant specifically for this purpose but at most places it wouldn't fly / would be useless.
Want to become codesters?
The article was talking about the iPhone, hence my suggestion being for the iPhone which does not ring the alarm when it's off. At least it didn't until 3.0 where I tried it last time.
Sounds like a time saver! I continuously find myself trying to think of the most general searches and sifting through countless pages to find nothing, it's frustrating.
That's all true, but I fear it might be painting a slightly unrealistically positive picture :-) There are also other kinds of reasons for why everything moves slower than one would hope, and they aren't quite as interesting.

Some system your project depends got deprecated again, and you need to decide whether to spend the time to migrate it to the replacement now, or hope it continues working until the replacement has been deprecated too. The development configuration files for other teams systems that you need to inherit from to bring up a full test cluster for your own system changed again, causing mysterious errors. Hopefully early on, rather than in the output of a data pipeline that takes 20 hours to run.

Or the system your working on is somehow relevant to the outside world. There's a legal/political/PR problem, and actual engineering effort is needed to implement the minimal hack to get rid of the problem as soon as possible. Or your project has inexplicably and apparently without anyone's knowledge been marked as falling under Sarbannes-Oxley, and now some change needs to be explained in great detail to a SOX auditor. Which would of course be much more important than any work you were actually hoping to get done :-)

The code base is so massive and there are still so many unexpected dependencies that even with distributed and cached compilation, just the processes responsible for the distribution might be enough to drive your machine to its knees. Of course there's a process in place to try to keep the dependencies from growing out of control, but that's then going to make your life much more difficult if you're working on the inconvenient parts of code nearer the center of the dependency graph, and thus more strictly regulated.

Also, there have historically been a lot of misguided projects that in practice failed but somehow didn't die. Usually they will get killed eventually, but they do tend to grow larger and live longer than they should. Maybe that's changed lately.

This is, of course, an unrealistically negative view. But at least in my experience these kinds of issues were more significant drags on productivity than the fun kind of issues you listed. Though that could be just because the boring kind of drag is much more noticeable. Google's a great place to work at in any case.
>He'd strap on headphones to block out everything but the endorphin rush as he cranked code late into the night on a new service that instantly syncs all of your files on all of your devices.

sigh Thought we were done with the hacker cliches?
But why can't Dropbox become the main provider for this fully cloud-hosted architecture? So I keep my cloud files in Dropbox, and grant my cloud apps access to subsets of those files. Then they would truly be the "filesystem of the web" and the growth/profit prospects are rosy.

For example, http://leanpub.com/ uses Dropbox in an interesting way. As Dropbox beefs up their API and adds features, I think there are many interesting growth/monetization possibilities. I think the main danger is the competition from Google/Apple/MS.
VPS is good because I don't want to deal with the hardware, I just want it to work, BUT I want full control of the software I run, within reason. My definition of within reason is I like to run experimental servers on my VPS and see how they perform. Not within reason is trying to run my own mail server. I did that once in high school, just to see if I could. It was a painful experience and I'll never do it again.
It seems the author of that article doesn't know that spell checking, translating and understanding text are actually major features of pretty new software, too. I don't know how the spellcheckers are for English, but in German they really suck since years. You can't just let MS Word autocorrect your text, because the spell checker will insert more errors than it can remove. So when I want to find out, how to spell a word correctly in German, I just use the Google search bar. Why? Because they consider spell checking a hard task TODAY!

Spell checking is not about comparing a list of words to what the user wrote and tell him what didn't match. It's much more about understanding the users intention and helping him shaping that intention into an officially recognised grammar/spelling. Example: "then" is a correct word. But in the context of "Google's spell check is better then Word's" "then" is actually wrong. (Google also doesn't tell you about that mistake but the first search result actually contains a "than", which is recognised as what you actually meant)

I hope I could make it clear, why I think it still is a major feature to have the best spell checker and I think, the title really should be revised.
"competent enough to matter" is a bit condescending don't you think?
The main danger for Dropbox is the commoditization of cloud storage, and filesystem abstraction. Dropbox style sharing going to be commonplace, everything will interact with the cloud, and web apps will abstract data in ways that make the conventional metaphors of files and directories obsolete. Plus as Amazon improves their API's and competitors emerge, Dropbox will get squeezed from every possible direction. They should pump and and dump while the market's good.
This guy is going to eventually run afoul of the US Customs and the FDA. http://bit.ly/w2XSMA

"Food that is sent to an individual in the U.S. for personal use (i.e. not for resale) by a business is subject to special requirements of the Food and Drug Administration. Businesses that send goods to the U.S. must file prior notice. Prior notice may be filed on-line if the goods are being sent through the postal service."
The mute button in iOS has a worse problem: the ability to be repurposed to lock orientation. I say this from my own experience having developed a popular (paid) app and dealt with angry customers complaining that it doesn't have sound.

After a little research it turned out that people often don't even know that their device is set to lock orientation, and sound is muted. And how would they - knowing that, other developers purposefully IGNORE mute and so they don't have to deal with a BROKEN feature. I did the same...

I just got tired of explaining to my clients that my app is actually fine, it's the other apps (that have sound) that are broken.