skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a few problems. The first is that journalists are, on the whole, reasonably ignorant in terms of depth. Not in a malicious way, but keeping your finger on the pulse of an entire industry while having to meet deadlines is ridiculously tough - especially if you don't get the freedom to schmooze, put on events, travel, and what not (as, say, Michael Arrington does). They focus on breadth rather than depth in most cases.

Further, tech journalists are not known for taking risks to get stories (compare to photojournalists). They could travel to Duluth and profile a start-up there, one in Huntsville, one in San Luis Obispo, and wherever, but the risk is too high of not coming up with a solid story. In the Valley they can rely on their contacts (often well established entrepreneurs who are part of the digerati) to give them more of the same. Outside of the valley? Unless someone in the digerati knows you or you're making some really big waves, the risk of coming out to profile you is pretty high.
That is true. It seems once you've put in enough to get onto the PR gravy train, however, paying for it becomes less than essential.
A few reasons:

1) Advertisers don't "get" it. They try to fit the idea of a "widget" into their standard idea of an ad, so that's all it ends up being. To much -brand- and not enough -utility-.

2) They are risky. The people pushing widgets use a bunch of metrics that don't really correspond to anything other than low-quality eyeballs.

3) They are stupid. Talking desktop avatars. Put your face here. Get the weather. Is someone actually going to get long-term value out of them? No.

That's certainly not an exhaustive list, but it's what came to mind after working with the advertisers and working for a widget developer for a year.
Alex Payne: Emerging Programming Languages
I disagree. Pownce the app did fail. I'm not seeing anyone online calling this an "acquisition". Even on the Pownce blog, Leah says "We will be closing the service and Mike and I, along with the Pownce technology, have joined Six Apart".

Yes, maybe they got a small chunk for the IP, and maybe they will start something else down the road ... but Pownce failed and they have to work for someone else now.
cliff notes version: twenty people writing technically trivial code and making no money
Git seem nice, but as far as I know Github only use ssh. It suck when you are at work or school.
They get the people. Stopping Pownce means those new hires won't be working on Pownce and they can be doing whatever 6A wants.

Personally, I think this "acquisition" is a hiring technique. Instead of making Pownce look like a failure, 6A acquires it and shuts it down - the creators then look like heroes. If 6A had got them to shut it down and then hired them, they'd look like quitters running away to cushy jobs instead of being devoted to their startup. An acquisition makes it look a lot nicer in PR terms for both parties.
Hey, we started in San Luis Obispo :)
Agreed on both points, although 'git mv' is optional. As long as the old file is 'git rm'ed and the new file is 'git add'ed in the same commit, git detects the rename quite reliably.
Building a web app in 3 days with 50% of profits to charity
I was in the right place at the right time.

Went to an art school for their writing program (wanted to be a writer) and they cancelled it the year I got there. I sat in the computer lab (this is 1993) and taught myself everything I could about anything related to computers. I mean I literally hung out in the labs for 12-14 hours a day.

I learned to write software that year using SuperCard and writing extensions in Pascal. My college was the second college in Minnesota (the U of M being the other) to get internet access. No graphical web yet and you could only access it on NeXT boxes, of which we had an entire lab.

Wrote what I can safely say is the first graphical instant messenger application. Worked on the local LAN via AppleTalk. It didn't catch on, but when I saw ICQ several years later I kicked myself in the pants for not pursuing it.

I got kicked out of school for not going to classes but was offered a job in the labs by the dean right after he booted me. I turned it down.

Six months later, a professor tracked me down and hired me to work at his digital photography studio (one of the few to have the hasselblad $15K digital leif-back). Built my first website in 1995, three days after Netscape 2 was released.

Haven't looked back since.

Some people do need to go to college though. Some people don't. Timing is as important as the ability to teach yourself. Being OCD totally helps. Ambition, timing and a little luck are the most important things.

YMMV.
I can't say I agree with this, but I thought that instead of downvoting it because I disagree with its premise, I'd upvote it because the premise--even if wrong--is interesting.

People have often made the claim that Java is unbearable without tool support. Why could/would this be true for Java but false for Lisp?
Add an 'Ignore' link on a user's profile, and then hide or otherwise diminish that user's contributions.
The male median income in Santa Clara County is $56,240. 42% above median is "starvation wages"? Even the median income in Palo Alto is only about $90k.
okay, i'm going to take the unpopular opinion here (based on the karma votes i see in this thread), and say that those two linked blog entries show a profound lack of programming ability. since when is it wrong to expect a programmer to be good at programming?
One directs to ?pp=1. One's dead, so I can't see the URL (possibly it's full-page).
Beauty of Soul: Oscar Wilde & Anton Chekhov
SF Mayor Gavin Newsom comes to YouTube
Kevin's techtv personality aside, I associate a lot of Digg's early adoption to his participation on TWIT. When iTunes first started accepting Podcasts, TWIT was the #1 show with ~250k+ subscribers... as far as market demographics are concerned, this was a perfect fit for plugging his digg project -- which Kevin did a lot of for free!

Consequently, I really like Kevin and I wish he never left TWiT. It was the old TechTV re-united and with everything in their control... one-by-one it seemed each person left or became less involved as TWiT launched them into different careers. Can't blame them tho -- TechTV and TWiT were fantastic springboards for all those involved.
Hey, there's no reason to downmod him. He's just looking for clarification as to why cross-posting is bad. And I personally feel that it's not; just because a comment was posted on Reddit doesn't mean the comment is bad.

... and a comment such as "you cross-posted from Reddit! go away! we don't serve your kind here!" isn't worth +12 karma.
mv is just sugar, though, you can easily copy the file using unix "cp" and delete/add to get the same result. Git does not track renames.
Hackers laugh, cry, have girlfriends (or boyfriends) just like everyone else. And they are suspectible to the same psychology as everyone else. They just often don't realise it because they think the world revolves around logic.

I've managed hackers in different startups, and my experience is that they aren't that different from anyone else in this respect. The primary difference is that they think these rules don't apply to them, which of course makes it much easier to apply them.
Yaw, that was hyperbole-- starvation wages for a dev (i.e. way below market value) was what I meant.

Generally you calculate a FTE at 1.5 - 2.5x their salary in terms of fully loaded cost (taxes, benefits, minimal overhead). In this cast, I was thinking $80. Do you think that team (or any funded startup team) earns less in San Francisco?
Did anybody notice the youtube style comment?:

WHAT A WASTE OF TIME AND INTERNET SPACE. WHY NOT REPORT ON THE GOOD THAT OUR TROOPS ARE DOING IN IRAQ? WHERE ARE THE GOOD STORIES?? OUR FREEDOM FIGHTERS HAVE OCCOMPLISHED SO MUCH IN THE LAST FEW YEARS, AND THE LIBERAL INTERNET IGNORES THEM, JUST LIKE THEY IGNORE GOD AND THE TEN COMMANDMENTS!!!

IF YOU MUST HATE THE TROOPS FROM YOUR LIBERAL IDEOLOGY, WHY NOT AT LEAST TALK ABOUT JESUS? I SAW NO REFERENCES TO JESUS ON YOUR WEBSITE!! WHY NO BIBLE PASSAGES AT LEAST?? THESE MEN ARE DYING FOR YOUR FREEDOM TO SIT AROUND AND TYPE USELESS CRAP, AND ALL YOU CAN DO IS DEFICATE ON THEIR IMAGE AND THE SAVIOR FOR WHOM THEY ARE WORKING.

YOU ARE JUST ANOTHER LIBERAL TERRORIST. HOPEFULLY THIS ECONOMY WILL CLEAN UP THE INTERNET AND GET RID OF WEBSITES LIKE THIS. ENJOY HOMELESSNESS, APOSTATE.

WTF is it?
Woo, Cal Poly! SLO is my favorite city - sadly, it's a bit too expensive..
Yaw I was rolling in stuff like phone costs, parking costs, etc. Really, you ought to include every single expense associated with that employee for a proper analysis, but yaw-- it's probably a touch heavy.
If you do enough volume, your costs should shrink... The experience curve.
that site is:

DUMB
Mac Internet share almost 9%; Windows drops below 90%; iPhone Fourth
who said there was a rope?

Cut out your assumptions and the problem becomes easier.
If you're going to be that brief, you better be right.

I always use vi, and I've pretty much never programmed in anything except Lisp.
* When you do something humble - is it still humble when you waste a few more hours writing about it and showing it off to the world?

* When you do something humble and it's rather unnecessary waste of time and effort - is it positively humble or genuinely pointless?

* When you want to send the frugality message to the team - do you first spend a few Ks on the blinds, then tear them down and then ruin the ceiling trying to undo what you did previously? Is that the "I'll do anything for your comfort" message?

There are million other ways to show support and make your people feel good. Pointless and unnecessary stuff is not among those ways.
The author seems to be arguing that programming 1. is boring and 2. should be made even more so. I couldn't get past page 3, and my attention span is much longer than this for worthwhile papers.
Yeap twitter doesn't make any profit.

A model worthy of emulation indeed.
Because they weren't better than Twitter at their core competency, nor did they provide a cleaner user experience (Google and Facebook beat Altavista/Yahoo/Myspace/Orkut/Friendster by doing exactly that).

The mp3 sharing feature? It hasn't compelled me to try pownce, there are already music-sharing social networks (pandora and LastFM) and I can paste a TinyURL'd link to youtube containing music or video into Twitter just fine.

As such they had no defensible technological advantage ("have a feature before someone else" isn't). They didn't have a strong technical person, all they had were decent web developers (Facebook's Dustin Moskowitz seems to be fairly talented and I know they had a very strong operations team; Google had backing of academia behind).

They could have still been a niche site and profitable, but they instead chose to burn their money on PR (this is clearly evident) hoping to "get big fast".
Reddit gets an (unofficial) iPhone app
Fiscal Policy Puzzles
It definitely looks nice, but like qhoxie says, I don't see anything extremely compelling about this vs. the dozens of other list sites out there.

No nested items, no syncing, what is the real advantage to using this over using Remember the Milk or something else?

You don't need a ton of killer features to differentiate it, but one is a minimum.
+1 for magit, so far. I do recommend printing out the manual so that you can consult it during the learning-curve phase. And there are still things that I prefer to do from the command line.
There are four entries in your startup diary and four submissions to HN -- this ratio seems a little bit off to me.
Personally I wouldn't classify Kamaelia as a distributed programming system, though it would be nice to increase support in that direction. :-)
I am not sure which version of Python will break Psyco. It looks like it stopped being maintained in '06.
'git diff' (also hopefully obvious)

Except it's not, since it'll output different things depending on whether you have staged anything or not.

This behavior is sometimes useful, but hardly obvious. Many aspects of git are like this, and it's frustrating, speaking as someone who slowly came around to git and now likes it quite a bit and would recommend it, to see its advocates forget or try to talk around just how difficult it is to learn. (1.5 and 1.6 may have improvements, but the claim that git's now roughly as easy to learn as hg or bzr, especially without understanding its internals, is absurd.)
Judge talent at its best and character at its worst.

Naively posting about one or two topics says little about one's programming ability, and much more about one's willingness to be open. It would mean a lot more if Pownce wasn't any good. But it was featureful, it seemed to work well, and quite a few people liked it. Dissing Leah for posting a few silly things is just nastiness.
I always thought Pownce was a solid product. Design, UI/UX, the site copy and marketing - overall I thought it was really well done. If it wasn't for the overwhelming success of Twitter or how easily Facebook launched the same features, things could have turned out much differently for them.

It wouldn't surprise me if within 3-6 months, Six Apart launches a rebranded version of Pownce geared towards companies and enterprise to compete with Yammer. As much as it pains me to agree with Arrington and Calacanis, I'll admit that Yammer has a good business model. And I can't imagine that it would take a tremendous amount of development time to make Pownce ready for those types of customers.
How is Ulysses a parody?
A New Picture of the Early Earth
I hope no one gave him this cliche as literal advice as he mentions in the first section. The first time I heard this cliche the first thought that popped into my head was, "That's a fun way to describe why programmers are always 'thinking out' ways to make tasks more 'efficient and maintainable.'"

I'm curious to know how other people understood this cliche when they first heard it.
I wonder what lesson that teaches.
I also work in an environment with people who should not be going near their command line. Well, its not that they shouldn't but they don't want to be forced to learn commands.

I'm working on a Git GUI that should be fairly beautiful (I'm a former graphic designer), but there aren't really any good GUIs out there right now.

If you do decide to use some sort of VCS, svn has some great GUIs.

like Versions (http://www.versionsapp.com/), Cornerstone (http://www.zennaware.com/cornerstone/) or ZigVersion (http://zigversion.com/).

Versions is nice because it can easily integrate with their hosted subversion stuff called Beanstalk.
Summary:

People like to make a difference. Good ones, anyway.
The TOS are a perfectly legitimate legal instrument to use against people violating the spirit of your site. It's common to see people in court over TOS violations caused by their bots.

A civil suit for violating a TOS is one thing, but this was a criminal case. Is it perfectly legitimate to put someone in jail for violating a TOS?
I'm all for taking risks early -- smart risks. But it's not really that smart to quit college to pursue a business that has no traction. Nobody is going to steal your idea if you don't drop out, and nothing is stopping you from working on it now. And if it does turn out that your idea takes off, you can always quit then. Staying in school is a smart hedge against failure that most entrepreneurs don't have.

Ignoring, for the moment, that a college degree lends you business credibility that's difficult to obtain otherwise, it's important to realize that quitting school right now probably won't give you a strategic advantage. Quit school, and you've got to feed yourself, house yourself, pay the bills and do a million other things just to manage your life. Stay in school, and you've got to do some homework. Otherwise, you're surrounded by smart people, free resources, subsidized housing and food. It doesn't get any easier!

Assuming that you're not going to some ridiculously expensive private school (and paying for it out-of-pocket), I can hardly think of a better place to start a business than a University. I've never had more free time than I did as an undergrad, and I think that others would tell you the same.
Best 15 Ajax Based Start pages
His comment is relevant to the topic. Yours is an attempt at public shaming. If your desire is to see the level of discussion here not sink to the level of Reddit, I suggest you think very seriously about which of them is the greater foul, and act accordingly.
Anyone made one where you could provide some examples and out comes a regexp that does the changes? :)
Most decent colleges will let you take an indefinite "leave of absence" to pursue other stuff, and come back whenever you're ready without reapplying and without having lost your credit. Technically, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerburg, and Larry & Sergey aren't dropouts, they're just still on leave and haven't bothered to come back yet. Wozniak did go back, after his plane crash, and finished his degree.

And I found it wasn't time that was the limiting factor, it was attention. I found it really difficult to have spare attention to devote to personal projects when I was a physics major, learning CS fundamentals (mostly on my own, but I took some upper-level electives and ended up finishing the major), doing sailing & orchestra, and trying to have a semblance of a social life. Might be easier in a less-demanding major with fewer activities, but I found it a lot easier to do personal programming once I got a job.
I think it's better to release early and iterate. Extensions aren't a launch-critical feature.
I disagree.

The CouchDB post is about someone writing something others might find useful, acknowledging that it might not be the best solution, and graciously accepting corrections from others. In short, everyone's a winner.

The rounding number post simply reflects that the days where a computing bachelors was taken under the Faculty of Science have long since past.

We've all written code that was stupid beyond all comprehension - even PG will cop to that - so never having written bone-headed code isn't a prerequisite for being a good programmer (edit: the opposite is probably true). You need to judge a body of work.
Not free? Really??
I have been looking for an application like this for a while. However, as other people have stated, getting an iPhone app out there right now is crucial. Even if you charged a dollar or two for the app, I know I would snatch it up right away. Remember the milk premium is just too much for me to get the app.

If you are looking for a partner in developing these widgets , please email me at rick AT rickharrison DOT me - I'd love to help you with these.
Because it doesn't solve the cheating described in the post you replied to. Distribute all you want but if 5 of 6 players are colluding player #6 is gonna be screwed.
Those are potentially misleading examples:

* Bill Gates had the resources of an extremely well-connected and wealthy family to hedge his risk. He has also repeatedly and publically advised young people to stay in college, and not follow his path.

* Mark Zuckerburg didn't leave college until Facebook was growing so quickly that he had to make the choice.

* Larry and Sergey were grad students; they were trying to get their doctorates, not their BS degrees.

Ignoring all of that, there's some serious selection bias going on: for every Bill Gates, there are ten thousand droupouts who are flipping burgers.
This problem is framed in a way that is subtly different from another way of looking at it that may offer different solutions.

Looking at a given comment as a "broken window" would seem to me to lend itself to specific treatments (i.e. a "flag" or "report" option), but you could also look at each comment as a contribution to the community that should be considered as a whole.

I think if you treat every comment (exclusing illegal content or obvious spam/vandalism) as though it has value, even if that value is negative, it might lead to tools that highlight comments, demonstrating that they're unacceptable. HN (and now Engadget?) have shaded negative comments that are along the lines of what I'm thinking of.
How to Build and Launch a Social News Site in 21 Days
you rule for this
First of all, looks good.

I would suggest a few things:
Let me make a list w/o signing up. (check out how stack overflow does anonymous stuff..it's good.)
Don't tell me "there's no post-signup xxx" and then make me confirm my e-mail. (for that sake, don't make me confirm my e-mail, use oid or something, what's my e-mail really worth to you anyway?)
"You've been activated (hopefully)" -- Unsure your software works?
Don't make me login after I activated. This is three times I have to put my password in before I can use it.
What is the exclimation icon next to an item?
Advertising your competitors? are you sure?
How are items sorted? They're not draggable, but they don't seem to be in a instantly recognizable order either.
Could I get a hover state on the bin so I can tell that I'm going to commit to an action?
Could I undo the bin?

Re: twitter. Here's the way I did it. 3 step process. first, you must follow me. second, input your twitter name on my site. Third, I send you a dm, you input the code to confirm, that's it, now you're tied.

That's all I have at a quick glance. Looks good, with a good api, and a simple purpose.
Not really an argument, just pointing out that there's a 3rd option besides "drop out" and "stay in school". And it sounded like that was the one unalone was considering.
IPhone Gross Margin: 55%
I honestly think that 4chan has some of the highest comment standards of any board I can think of, particularly for initial posts (comments can be fairly vacuous). A lot of people go to /b for the trolling, and a lot of trolls go completely ignored or get called out almost immediately.

Sure the board isn't first-order intelligent, but intelligence (along with timing and a certain type of wit) certainly helps when trying to get people riled up.
Ask YC: Where to find a good freelance web programmer?
I need a simple retail website designed and programmed. It will be for selling jewelry.

Where could I find some reputable and/or economic people to do this for me?
Though it's an interesting concept, I think they would need to recreate their algorithms too quickly to stop spammers, plus recaptcha has a dual purpose/benefit of helping computers when they fail with OCR.
I don't hate captcha as long as it is done well.
Because you don't need to write a lot of boilerplate in Lisp, perhaps.