skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So basically instead of making me copy the link ... let me send the invite link and it's details of the event right from your page to all the networks I am on (Facebook, Twitter,etc).

Ping.fm does something similar ...pushes out status notifications.
This is a really interesting/fascinating webapp. A few suggestions.
1. Improve the design / User Interface. It's a bit clunky and diminishes the experience.
2. Make the search field auto-complete. Use jQuery and you could have it done in a few minutes. I am not a chemist, so I don't know the exact spelling of most chemicals or elements. http://jetlogs.org/2007/10/22/jquery-auto-suggest-with-keyup...
Not sure about the update, but the TextMate mailing lists and IRC channel are very active. TextMate 2.0 is in the works. It's hardly abandonware.
Thanks - That was pithy, informative, and exactly what I was missing.
And then read this charming series of stick-figure comics about Walter Freeman.

http://eyeteeth.livejournal.com/tag/walter+freeman
The first half of #1 was my first complaint.

Okay, what the hell am I agreeing to show up for? Oh, I don't really know. Someone can tell me that information, but I can't really refer back to it.

The second half might be erring on the side of complex because it is trying to target certain technology, rather than staying "pure" and being just about spreading info on a web interface. If I wanted to keep it simple, I would just have a description where a date and time could be included in plain text.
Oh, sure. I thought he was complaining more about the excessive complexity of modern computing environments, though, the way that mainframe people used to do around 1970, and the way minicomputer people used to do around 1980. Maybe he should try programming an 8-bit AVR.
Ask HN: Why bookmark when you can keep the text too? (check out my web clippings app)
Hey all,

A while back I got frustrated with my growing pile of bookmarks, bookmark files, links in text files, etc. clipng is my implementation of a solution: it uses a bookmarklet to collect the current selection from any page. Call that a clipping. Clippings are taggable, shareable, and searchable. You can also view others' clippings and subscribe to a particular tag or user by way of an Atom feed.

The interface is still rough and my indexing could be faster but I already use it every day.

Have at and let me know what you think!
I'm not sure if other tools like this exist but man I could've used something like this back in my Organic Chem classes. I like it, I tried to search for a few things and was able to find most of it (couldn't find nitroglycerin). Best of luck!
Ah so it was a google thing.

Super - the world is sane again ;) :)
Thoroughly agree with the above sentiment.

@OP: I love the concept - it needs some work but it's got great potential :)
I've always been fond of Salt Spring Dollars (http://www.saltspringdollars.com/).
iPhone PSD Vector Kit
Want Windows XP? Dell wants an extra $150 from you
IIRC, one of the major results of the Ericcson language studies (see for example http://www.erlang.se/publications/Ulf_Wiger.pdf) was that the lines of code metric was more or less constant over projects and across languages.

"Comparisons between Ericsson-internal development projects indicate similar line/hour productivity, including all phases of software development, rather independently of which language (Erlang, PLEX, C, C++ or Java) was used. What differentiates the different languages then becomes source code volume."

Do you have a better metric? How about skill in solving tough algorithmic problems which haven't been before solved? Often on, for example, TopCoder, the top competitor can solve a set of three problems in 15 - 30 minutes. The median competitor, even in the upper division, solves zero. Some of the problems at only the 'medium-level' in those sets are in fact so difficult that they are given as two-week assignments in university courses, and only a fraction of students can complete it. This doesn't seem like a difference in reliability and bug count, it seems like a difference in kind in both algorithmic ability and productivity.
I wasn't about to find the original report either, so I could be mistaken in this way.
Sorry, but this is already sophistication (in the archaic sense).

All things that happen must have a cause.

Even Big Bang had its Cause. And since the exact definition of God is: "The only one not caused by anything, but simply 'cause' of Itself", there's no escape here...
You can look at Major League Soccer in the US. David Beckham makes $6.5 million/year and the median salary for all players is $53,000. Lowest salary for developmental players is $13,000.

http://soccernet.espn.go.com/columns/story?id=427678&...

$53k a year is probably not too bad unless you live in expensive areas, but it's really not a lot considering that the length of your career is probably less than ten years.
> makes it sound like I just ran an RSA command

:-D What would you say?

Thanks. I'll apply those ideas.
link? and is it free?
Agree 100%. Although we were talking to some of the VCs in your 2nd bucket, we ended up going with #1. Our seed round is entirely angel funded, with one institutional player (#3 type) making an exceptional angel investment.
The author suggests that programmers vary in talent by reliability, buglessness, extensibility and maintainability. He goes on to suggest that these are hard to measure.

"It's not that good developers can churn out 10 times as many features as the bad ones. It's rather that good developers write code that have less bugs, more extensible and more maintainable. These are the things that you can't measure by statistics or figures."

I've given a few examples of good developers making systems that are orders of magnitude harder to complete, in the same time. In many cases it's not within the current talents of most programmers to write those systems at all. Another good example is the Quake engines. Additionally, in programming contests or student assignments there are many examples of people completing the same task in vastly different amounts of time. Finally, he states that reliability, buglessness, maintainability and extensibility are things you can measure with statistics, but many people have quantified uptime, maintenance, density-of-bugs, and extension time, to moderate success.
Main reason I am using that OpenId Clickpass thingy ;)
PG: "Perhaps I should have added that 40% was more than applications usually go up year to year." (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=386730)

So the growth rate seems to have increased.
Popular Science Article on Commuter Flying Saucers
Create your own Twitter with Yonkly
Yonkly is a hosted, white label solution for creating your own microblog network.
I looked at the title and thought "Wow, are they applying before they stop growing? Is YC targeting middle-school students now?"
"The only downside is that making forms/reports isn't as simple - but honestly, is learning html really so hard?"

The use case he cited really is a problem for HTML: designing the interface in front of a user in real time. Maybe using DreamWeaver, but not sure that's the same.

This seems to be exactly the shortcoming that balsamiq is addressing.
Top 10 failures in tech for 2008
Icrontic.com explores the tech industry's top 10 bungled launches, decisions and products for 2008.
I think the stats show that VB.NET is the most popular .NET language - so I think we are talking many more than thousands.
I skimmed through the article, but couldn't find anything really new there.
Absolutely. The frightening thing is that average programmers on COBOL project seemed to still turn out ~3 lines of COBOL a day.
Was he really asking to work less? He was getting equivalent results and asking for less useless ass-in-0seat time. I know for a fact that a guy like that reacts well to more autonomy. Doesn't matter so much what the developer asks for in this case. It's how the manager reacts when discovering talent like that. In this case, it was an epic fail for management.
Making Something From Nothing - Stone Soup Tastes Great
AWS Launches Public Data Sets
Its science!
Microsoft's Web Plan: Q&A with Steve Ballmer and Qi Lu
Poorer Nations Go Online on Cellphones
Its more like a spiral then a circle. Its the spiral of life.
Very useful, thanks !
A cool book on Python / Software Design - Under GNU Documentation License.
Its not just HTML though - to quote Steve Yegge - its the whole web UI 'crap sandwich'
The Little book on Semaphores - under GNU Open Doc License
I'm sorry. I don't mean to be an ass. I don't mean to nitpick. I just find it hilarious that your comment thanking him for taking the time to write something does not take the time to write out "seriously".

Not a criticism in any way, just an appreciation of the delicious accidental irony of the every day.
Learning Perl the Hard Way - under GNU Open Doc License.
You could remove one more step by immediately redirecting to the 'view responses' page, then ajax the event properties from there (name,description,place,time).
What we really need is technology to let people read Hacker News while still in the womb.
Brilliant Marketing - Put In The Doghouse
Does Scrum require TDD/BDD?

I think BDD is going to be limited where your biggest and hardest requirements are things like, "The game should be fun to play".
(cue lion king music)
Nutrition, Education, etc, have continual costs. If we have a continuously dropping natural intelligence, then the part of our intelligence derived from the environment will only get more expensive. That's unsustainable.

The Flynn effect itself will probably stop or slow all-but-completely anyway

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...
Urk, I'd love to watch the screencasts but sadly can't open your Keynote file on my defiantly un-Mac Ubuntu box. Little help?
Yes, but the question the essay is setting out to answer is: what happens when the VCs recover?

I've been thinking about this a lot recently. I think that the answer is, that VC's aren't going to be able to fund web based software startups as much. We just don't need the money.

Who does need the money? Green Tech, Biotech, hardware/embeded, enterprise software. Those companies can use the capital and might actually be willing to jump through the hoops necessary to IPO. VC's only really get paid off when companies IPO or get acquired for huge sums of money.

I think that this is going to be a water shed in Silicon Valley culture. One of the reasons that there are so many software engineers in the Valley, is because there have been a lot of VC funded startups and jobs since the first bubble in the 90's.

VC money is going to start chasing different kinds of companies, which means more green tech, biotech and hardware/embeded, enterprise software jobs. That means more electrical, genetic and chemical engineers and less software engineers in the area.
I really like the idea of being able to search for a molecule just by drawing it! It's a fantastic and intuitive idea, if it works...

Which it doesn't, at least for me. When I click the draw link, all I see is an empty white popup box with Preview and Submit buttons that I can't interact with.

Here's my setup, for debug purposes:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008072820 Firefox/3.0.1
I've provided links to the raw screencast quicktimes.
Tl,dr. Anything interesting happen in this movie after Intellisense?
The GetBundles links aren't working for me, and I can't find any reference to it anywhere else via google or github. Am I completely crazy?
I bet your library smells of rich mahogany.
Top 10 International Products of 2008
* Would be very surprised if they can keep using the word "Twitter" all over their app.

* Kind of ignores the whole point of Twitter, which is a deliberately trivial application carried by a huge network effect.
Wow, that's pretty awesome. Can you do this without using the mouse?
The advantage of UNIX is that you can make things in your way. For example, you can decide to use your own editor, instead of the IDE of the jour. There are many languages to choose from (python, perl, php, C++), so you can go with the one you are most comfortable.

Also, since you are not depending on one vendor, you can use the same tools for a longer time -- no need to change to the latest visual studio, for example. So, UNIX is complex, but change is more incremental than when using Windows/Mac OS X SDKs.
The goals seem to be what your service is about. However, you seem to require a registration step. Making this an iPhone app would eliminate the need for the user to register as a separate step.
Ask HN: Gift ideas for hacker types?
I'm trying to come up with gift ideas for people who are generally interested in computers and technology but tend to already have plenty of "stuff". I figured a lot of other HN readers were probably in the same situation. Any recommendations?
Paul - Assume that

1) your thesis is correct, and,

2) that a good startup hub is created primarily though the availability of investors (as observed in the essay "The Hacker's Guide to Investors"),

Don't these two things imply that Silicon Valley's prominence as a startup hub will wane?
That's a strange response. I'm saying that what he said was inappropriate, not that he shouldn't have the right to say it.
Couldn't agree more. As a serial co-founder myself, I can't wait to be able to fully start businesses with no VC involvment.

One thing is bogus in the article though: it's age-biased. $3000/m to cover living expenses for the founders? Yes, if you are talking about kids straight out of college living in a dorm. What about slightly less desirable older people, like say 30-year old (now, that's old :-). So a startup with 3 founders would need closer to $15,000/month of revenue. Well, it's not so easy to generate that kind of revenue.

The better advice is to find co-founders who can work part-time (evenings and weekends). That can sustain itself for a long time, even if it feels like it takes forever to get anything done.

fairsoftware.net - where software developers share revenue from the apps they create
Books? My gf usually picks something from my Amazon wishlist when she has no other ideas..
Missing atheist sign found in Washington state
I'd say 5-7 years would be time to start looking at an entire overhaul.

Here's the thing. Your site should be in constant state of flux with new features added and subtracted, moved etc. After a while you'll just end up with a bit of code "crud". Its almost worth it just to do a site wide front end rewrite once every 3 years or so. I think 5-7 years is about the amount of time that it takes for a styles to change enough where your site will start to get a bit stale.
Ok, I'm not for one to yell "off topic" and usually find slightly off-topic conversations interesting, but does this really have an aorta of relevance to HN?
Are you looking to publish the data? Or just use it for personal use?
IDEs seem to be more a symptom of a programming environment that is poorly designed especially if your IDE is generating large amount of code for you. Perhaps that is what petzold was advocating if I could stand reading the talk in its entirety.
cg5[14:14] Bundles > svn co http://svn.textmate.org/trunk/Review/Bundles/GetBundles.tmbundle/
svn: PROPFIND request failed on '/trunk/Review/Bundles/GetBundles.tmbundle'
svn: PROPFIND of '/trunk/Review/Bundles/GetBundles.tmbundle': 503 Service Unavailable (http://svn.textmate.org)
I don't think that it means that if Torvalds gets shot tomorrow that the Linux kernel will die. I think that what it means is that there are parts that only he is knowledgeable or invested in enough work on in order to fix certain bugs. That is, if he were to die tomorrow, other would be able to take his place, technically, but they would have to spend a while reverse engineering the code and might even make significant changes to suit there tastes.

This happens all the time with commercial products.
From Roadmap Secrecy to Modular Innovation Challenges of the Social Networks
What UI are you thinking he would use if he were using Unix?

I think that one of his points. The UI was much easier.
I didn't want to redirect the search engine bots. Perhaps I can check the user agent and accomplish this. Thanks.
This is my experience as a consultant.

We started to have all the customers requesting web applications. It was our specialty but in many cases the web applications were not justified. But the customers insisted. Writing web applications was way more complex than writing regular client server applications.
ARf, an Augmented Reality Virtual Pet on the iPhone
My Clojure Emacs Setup (I'll show mine if you show yours)
I've always found Textmate to be emacs-y. One reason I like it
Gives new meaning to "early stage" funding.
Microsoft, IBM, GE and Exxon are making a lot of money - in aggregate and per employee. GM lost to Toyota which makes a lot of money, too.

It seems you are mistaking your wishes for reality...
U.S. Loses 533,000 Jobs in November
Babel Fish, Google Translate and human go head-to-head
No. They (can) make us more productive.

When you're working with a large number of source files, the ability to have auto-complete, parameter guessing, getter/setter creation, auto-builders, and real-time code syntax/quality/checkstyle/pmd/findbugs/etc... validation means you can write working code more quickly.

The ability to refactor/rename across an entire project with a click of a mouse means I'm much more likely to refactor as the code evolves, leading to higher quality, more readable, more extendable code. Seeing class hierarchy trees with one click, jumping to view the source of a method I'm using, remote debugging totally integrated with my source code, etc... is all really valuable.

Sure, drag-and-dropping everything in some IDEs means you're missing a lot of the core stuff in programming, but at least for me, I am more productive using Eclipse than I was using Emacs and the shell.
I believe PG has published absolute numbers in the past. Giving the growth rates would give the whole picture.
What makes you think that ambition, curiosity, and love of a particular domain are innate qualities?
Slightly OT, but: "1. Open TextMate. 2. Type "lorem". 3. Hit tab."

http://twitter.com/mikeysan/status/1040902296
Notepad++ does that too (back before I was a happy TextMate/OSX.. Notepad++ on Win gave a good experience)
Actually, we make it deliberate not to use the word twitter and if you see it on our site then it is probably accidental :)
It seems to me that frameworks are too big to develop easily and they lock the user into a certain... well... framework. Anyone interested in coming up with a bottom up approach? Ie. make higher and higher level tools for a certain task (almost certainly web programming) until one could create a webserver with a few lines or move as low level as needed to make modifications and use the high-level components elsewhere?
Cheap and Easy Steps to Founding a Start-Up in Silicon Valley
Suppose person A has nuturing parents as a child. Nurturing parents encourage study and hard work leading to higher IQ as an adult. Moreover, nurturing parents feed their children nutritious food and no matter how many cigarettes or calories I consume as an adult I still had good nutrition when my brain (and sperm) were developing. I don't think their experimental design precludes this, although looking at sperm health does have the advantage that it's less likely to be influenced by decisions as an adult.
Linus once said that debuggers are for sissies. I knew he would regret saying that sometime.

Here is another of his rants against debuggers. Just substitute 'kernel debugger' by 'simple chipset debugging facilities' (whatever that means) in that email and basically he has his response for why Intel isn't adding it.
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Kernel/linus-im-a-bastard-speech.h...

Intel engineers are saying, 'simple chipset debugging facilities' are for sissies!
300 Million iPhone apps downloaded
I have to admit, as a hardcore hacker I'm clueless here. I wanted to type "water", "beer" then out of frustration I end up typing "wtf" lol.

Seriously you should find away to attract the attention of regular guys like me, the potential here is to make sense of chemistry to people by being a bit more talkative on the front page.

Overall it looks like a great tool.
Ask HN: Shall we hasten the demise of IE6 by charging more?
We're debating displaying twice as many ads to IE6 users as we do to everyone else. For our pay web services, we're debating including an IE6 surcharge.

While we'd love to drop IE6 completely, it feels crazy to do so while it's still 20% of visits. But there is definitely a lot of extra development time needed to keep things working for older browsers.

In both cases, we'd make it 100% clear why they saw more ads and paid more, with instructions on how to upgrade.

If everyone did such a thing, maybe we'd see the financial/annoyance incentive lead them in the right direction to browsers that don't cost as much to support.

It's been a long week, so this may be a bit crazy, but I thought I'd get some discussion going as Friday comes to a close.
You'd be surprised.. Twitter is like a cess-pool. I think these niche-microblogs have a lot of value
The whole point of jQuery is to serve as a substitute for the DOM, allowing scripts to efficiently interact with page elements. If you're running this via a Python script, you already control each and every bit of your page code. What's the point? I can only see this being useful in Python for screen scraping.
Good and bad programmrs use IDEs. Good and bad programmers use text editors. Bad programmers use IDEs as a crutch, supporting their otherwise poor programming skills.

It's simplistic to say that IDEs make us dumber. Auto-completion can lead to a vagueness about code structure but refactoring tools can greatly aid programmers to complete repetitive error prone tasks.
Nerd battle
I have grown to hate the MS family of programs's insistence that Daddy knows best, and I must turn off the magic on a case-by-case basis.

I noticed a big difference when I transitioned from Visual Studio/Netbeans type coding to Emacs. I stopped hunting through class hierarchies and started, you know, actually learning the libraries I needed to use. Emacs lets me be the magician.

I haven't programmed using XAML, but it reminds me of the .ui file produced by Qt Designer, which I've edited by hand at times.
Ok, I have no idea how you came up with 57%. Even if you add 18%+30% (which is not mathematically valid) you'd only get 48%. How in the world did you get 57%?!

The real probability based on the article (according to my calculations) is 34.4%, which is actually much better than I would have guessed.

Here is how I came up with that.

The article states a first time entrepreneur succeeds at an 18% rate. And someone succeeds at a 20% rate given they failed the first time.

P(First Time Success) = .18

P(First Time Failure) = .82

P(Success | First Time Failure) = .20

P(Second Time Success) = P(Success | First Time Failure) x P(First Time Failure) + P(First Time Success)

0.344 = .18 + (.82 * .20)

In words: 18 percent of entrepreneurs will succeed on their first try. 82 percent will fail. Of that 82 percent that failed, if they try again, they will succeed 20 percent of the time. To get a number from the original population of first time attempts you have to multiply the 82 percent who failed by the 20 percent who succeeded on the second try which results in 16.4%. That 16.4% is the percentage of the original population who tried on the first try but did not succeed until the second try. The end result being 34.4% of the original population will be successful on their first or second try.

Hopefully that makes sense.

* edit to format the formulas a little better