skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess my "obedience" line appeals more to high school than it does to college. In college, I'm having to do thinks like design a portfolio just to let my professor see my assignments, and it's taking a lot of diverse skills. In high school, grades are much more focused around busywork: several very mediocre students were ranked highly because they would do what the teacher asked to the letter, and nothing more.

I still think that projects are more valuable on a resume (or, I'd look at them more if it was up to me), because with a project you can see exactly what work was done. I can see something somebody made and understand what they place emphasis on, what details they skim over, and - to some degree - what taste they have in certain subjects. It's not valuable just because it's on the paper, but because you can glean more from a project than you can from a grade point average.
To restate the obvious, its definitely a great thing that they got acquired, so congrats to the pownce team.

However, my brief experience with the app was to create an account, login 2-3 times afterward and then never touch it again. I was surprised, like a lot of other people, about the amount of press they were getting for such a mediocre app.
Looks incredibly slick. I'd suggest making the signup process more instant (skip account creation altogether, or do it later).
Quantcast is better often, but there isn't enough data on pownce to show up anything on quantcast. That's generally a bad sign.
"Answer a question"

Good insight, that links together the two items qhoxie and I mentioned before, readers' interest and article's content, in a succint phrase.

You've also somewhat answered the second part, "what kills an article?" but do you have anything more to add?
right. it's not even about a degree or the knowledge. more than anything, as this acquisition shows, start-ups aren't about technology or knowledge: they're about executing on an idea and tons of PR and marketing.

but one way to increase your chances of winning (that is, drive a start-up to profitability or a home-run exit) is to get a body of knowledge that makes you stand out from others.

i certainly agree that college is the time to pursue personal projects: but personals means exactly this, personal. work on projects that will teach you the most vs. the projects that seem to be the best from business perspective. you have rest of your life to spend worrying about making a profit.

for 2 years out of my undergrad career i did contract systems administration / internal web app development. however, i've learned a lot more about systems administration. in retrospect, it'd have been better spent otherwise. trying to have personal projects while working full-time and doing a part-time masters is a great luxury.
It's not criticism, it's entertainment. It does not need to provide any criticism, as long as it's fun to watch.
IPhone mosaic image to celebrate 10,000+ apps in App Store
I disagree. Creating a website/webapp is ridiculously cheap IF you do it well. There's no barrier for entry. Anyone in their bedroom could be the next twitter on a shoestring.

Creating a website teaches you a lot, and is a lot of fun.
Both code and the market create value by processing information. Code can break too, but that's not an argument against writing code. So, I'm not seeing a strong argument that the market is essentially different than any other sort of value creating information processing we do.
not for non-US residents unfortunately. enjoy the free show!
we're 4 people at a startup using it, and I absolutely love it for the reasons nostrademons mentioned.
The answer was just Twittered by Eric Meyer (http://twitter.com/meyerweb):

Of course Pownce is shutting down: it's been months now since anyone needed a place to complain about Twitter outages.

My own analysis, now five months old, is a lot wordier:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=211870

Twitter holds a huge marketing advantage -- you can't say "Site X is just like Twitter" without saying "Twitter" -- and a big Metcalfe's Law advantage: Everyone who is remotely interested in Twitter-like sites already has a Twitter account, and those accounts won't magically disappear. Meanwhile, there will be more than one Twitter competitor, all desperately trying to distinguish themselves from each other as well as from the original.
I'm not sure they've failed, but their lack of traction has to do with 3 things, I think.

1. Trying to do too many things. Too many features meands market confusion and cluttered interfaces. There is power in simplicity and purpose.

2. Twitter had already won. The early movers and adopters were already there and the network effect was in motion.

3. Using Adobe Air for their non-web interface. Twitter never worked for me until Twitterific, but air is just SLOW and annoying I personally couldn't abide.
> Worst comes to worst, I leave college for a year or two, and come back after I've tried everything a bit older and a bit wiser.

Before you make this decision, you should talk to people who tried. However, as I've said, life isn't a planned waterfall project. You seem bright, focused and most importantly confident.

I guess what I mean to say, don't come away from this knowing _nothing but_ web development (whether with a degree or not).

When I was an undergraduate, systems administration was all I wanted to do. Then all I wanted to do was backend web-development. Now I've realized that both of these are just narrow technical skills that anyone could do, but I am no longer nineteen (yet luckily, I'm also not 30 yet).
How do you cancel the service?
One suggestion: bang out free iPhone app as soon as possible and get going on a gmail widget, and you will win doves of users that do not want to pay for RTM premium features (myself included)
It's not a matter of perseverance, though. I know I can finish college. I'm only a semester in, but I like classes, I can stand the people, and I'm good at this.

It's more that I'd rather take risks early. If I try this and succeed, I have more of a vantage point. Perhaps I'll end up at a better college, at a better program. If I stay in college for four years before doing this, my idea might have been taken, and if my idea doesn't work I'll have to hunt for an alternative venue. Right now, I've got the ability to leave for a little while, then come back, and I don't see why I shouldn't at least try.
There are many ways to show that you have perseverance. Going through university/college is but one.

Also IMHO college/university has to be one of the best places to meet like minded people.

If your aim in life is to work at a company where you have to tick boxes and go through a hiring dept which hires you based on some grades, then sure - get the grades.

Personally I've never been at an interview where they care what grades I've got, they care what I've done, and what I've built.
I'm a critic by nature. When I watch things, I do so with a critical eye. This was sloppy and poorly-done, and I don't derive amusement from that.

Compare that to the first seasons of the Simpsons, which were immaculate and polished to a fault.
Fox is really diligent about getting these removed. It's quite annoying.
A stopped clock is right twice a day.
Sony OLED TV
"The author here comes across as too biased and passionate to be taken seriously."

I find this the problem with a lot of the Register's articles. The reg can be humorous, and informative, but it often becomes too zealous to be taken seriously.
HumaneRegistry
I beg you to not bring your reddit nonsense here.

http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/7gnp2/the_simpsons_ge...
That's sound advice. Thanks!
What are you calculating as dev costs?

I've found that good healthcare + FICA + SECA + 401k costs about 15%-20% overhead on salary, not anywhere near 50%. ($120k/$80k = 1.5)

In any case, I agree with the general analysis.
Agreed! I am using Remember The Milk currently, but if you can make a better GMail widget I would for sure switch it up.
I copied and pasted it because I thought it was relevant. How is it nonsense? I explained why I thought this parody was poorly done and irrelevant.
Came here to mention those two points. Excellent job. FYI though, the big image above the sign up and tour buttons didn't appear until I disabled Safari AdBlock.
Winter 09 YC funded company seeks talented developer
We're a YC funded company seeking an additional hacker (and all round cool guy / gal) for the winter 09 cycle. We'd like someone who lives and breathes the web to help us bring our exciting new product to market.

We do most of our dev in PHP so being proficient in that as well as MySQL / Javascript / CSS is essential. A good eye for design is a big plus too and we're interested in anything else the candidate can bring to the team.

We will be based in the SF Bay Area from early January until April so the candidate will need to relocate there. Love of noodles / silly humour / late nights is a must.

Sound good to you? Please get in touch and let us know who you are and what you've been working on recently.

email us! talktopx@googlemail.com
His wasn't a review; it was a personal dig towards specific programmer's ability. Even professional critics usually have to make a sound argument, not just point to blunders on a blog.
No, that would be a successful startups. Most startups I've seen have the CEO sitting on a pedestal (e.g. Steve Case), with the developers at the very bottom of the totem pole.

He and his execs did not get out of the way and let us do our jobs, they actually did the opposite and made it harder to do our jobs, mainly because we had so much trouble figuring out what it was that they wanted us to build for them.

And naturally they expected us to make up the difference from their dawdling and indecision and ship on time, even though they ended up delaying almost all of our projects by around six months.
We used it in a style where 2-3 people teams shared code to develop a feature, a person often worked on different teams at the same time. When a group finished they forwarded they changes to the 'merge master', a weekly shift of lead developers of the company. After a code review the code reached our main repository or landed back for a review. Sometimes weeks of development arrived to the main tree in a safe way with full revision history. This kind of development method was unheard before, the style change improved code quality and reduced conflicts.

My favorite story when we worked with a college thousands of kilometers away till the last minute to demonstrate a key feature to a customer at a trade show, exchanging revisions by emails, delivered on a USB stick. That's a real technology start-up way to handle development. I wrote and debug a lot of code to that company but my biggest impact was to introduce mercurial to the team.
> someone has to do the data integration and run algorithms to compute a simple number to express how suspicious someone's behaviour is. HR managers will no longer personally google for applicants.

I think this is unlikely. If this 'simple number' was not an accurate measure of likely job performance then companies who relied on it would be at a huge disadvantage. Companies (and by extension their HR departments) who ignored it or incorporated their own information would tend to prevail.
Good thread. I like the "what is a good climate?" angle.
Add the ability to drag and drop items on the list. Also, the app runs a bit slow.
Well, according to their SEC filings they were profitable in 2005. You can argue the point ad nauseum if you like, when they move billions of dollars in cash there can be a lot of room for interpretation at times.
I don't think you can judge a person's ability based on a couple minor things like these. I applaud her honesty and willingness to put herself out there and the fact that she got things out the door. A lot of developers I know would rather chew off their left leg before admitting to a mistake or flaw in their coding much less have the balls to publish it.
At what local vapor-pressure?
I wish I could use Git on one of my current projects. But I need to work with non-programmers (on OSX in my case) and any command line stuff (or anything more complicated than checkout/add/update/commit) is totally out of the question.

Still, I'm sure it won't be long...
not if the anchor doesn't hit the floor because the rope isn't long enough.
Call for Votes: Top 100 Blogs for Developers (Q4 2008)
I was excited for the twitter integration until I tried to figure out how it worked and was met with "email us because regular people are not worthy" note on the blog. Not helpful. Is it that much work to write a blog post explaining how it works and then link it next to the twitter setup field in the preferences?
I'm not so sure that I want to be teaching my kids how to work for other people. If anything I'd rather teach my kids how to have people (or money) work for them.

I'd much rather teach my kids how to be responsible and do something because it needs to be done, and not just for the money.

I want teach my kids how to manage money responsibly. To some degree having them realize that it doesn't come easy helps yes, but linking it to work is not the only way. You can link it to good behavior, grades, self control, and many other things that are more valuable to teach than how to work for other people.

Plus some of the most important lessons in employment can not be taught until after the person has their first real job. Such as: the company does not care about you. They just want to squeeze as much work as possible, for the least pay. They will give artificial deadlines and scarcity to try to get you work more efficiently. They will try to get you to be loyal to them "be a team player".

It's pretty hard to teach those things if that first employer is you.

Personally BTW I don't give an allowance at all. I see no need to teach kids how to spend money. (i.e. get in the habit of spending money) If you need something you (your parents) buy it, that's all. You don't need to spend all the money you make - which is what happens usually with allowances (or they save for a while for something, which is the same thing - spend what you get).
Some people (including myself) find VCSs fascinating, but at the same time, a strong indicator of an excellent VCS is that it largely stays out of your way. Knowing you have a safety net if you need to track some large changes you may revert allows you to take bigger risks, but having a system which is reliable and doesn't interfere with group communication / workflow is at least as important. In the end, it's just a tool. Pick a pretty good one and move on.
Samsung SGH-X566 Unlocked
Samsung SGH-X566 is a cheap and stylish clamshell for Latin America. External VGA camera, internal colour screen and GPRS module are present.Samsung X566 is clamshell balanced very well enters design and technology.
My point is that most good hackers I know see through things fairly easily, and it undermines the message of "you're supported" when that support is not functioning in the best way possible. For instance, why does it take "days" to realize the sun is shining through the window and then two more to have someone who's not that great at putting up blinds put them up? Get someone in, fix the problem, get them out, bing-bang-boom, and you have a happy hacker, given most hackers I know. Take 5 days for something that should take 2 at the most (1 day to see the sun issue, 1 more to put up blinds) doesn't make people "secure in the knowledge that he is being...supported."
work on projects that will teach you the most vs. the projects that seem to be the best from business perspective

I think that the best metric is a third thing: "work on projects that you like the most."

I think that the start-up I'm working on will teach me a lot. And it's got more than enough potential to earn me a living, too. But more than that, it's an idea that I love. The fact that I think I can sustain myself with it is an added side effect.

I mean, I won't drop out of college just for the heck of it. My co-founder and I are applying to seed investors, though, and that means we'll spend time on leave from college working on the idea. If we get accepted, we'll work on the project full-time for as long as we can. But if we don't, then it'll continue to be a side project and we'll launch it from college.
?

I'm the CTO for a 20 person startup. I only went to one year of college. Art school even.
The design is awesome, most definitely. My only comment that hasn't been covered is the tour page - I would much rather have a short video than scroll up and down to match numbers with their descriptions. Great work.
First hit on Google for "bot tos violation court case" http://virtuallyblind.com/2008/07/14/blizzard-wins-sj-mdy/
Due to my recent discussion on submitting technical articles more effectively

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=380333

I'll provide a little commentary:

The general gist is that programming, as a respected engineering discipline, is in jeopardy today due to the attitude claiming good programmers eschew rigorous planning and development.

In his opinion, the open source movement has further improvished the engineering aspect of programming with its "release early, release often" motto, as too the ad hoc nature of extreme programming. Additionally, the lack of process in programming also means there is a lack of apprenticeship, which is integral to the other areas of engineering.

Finally, he pulls out the standard complaint that the newer programming language abstract away alot of important detail, and programmers are now less effective due to their ignorance.

In turn, the author recommends a set of standard practices he feels will improve the lazy programmer, of which I've listed the items that seem to summarize the others:

1. Know what you are doing all the time

This consists of keeping track of goals and milestones and intentionally working towards them at all times

2. Write an example and design the whole solution upfront

This helps clarify the final goal in the programmers mind.

3. Test your own code, and test what you already know works

This ensures the programmer has a solid understanding of their work, and that they have a baseline to test against.

4. Be methodical

Keep notes, and use the scientific method to make predictions about program behavior that is not understood.
Try http://gizmodo.com/5100217/the-simpsons-gets-20-years-of-app...
>I think success at MIT would be that a student found the coursework challenging, opportunities plentiful, and made lots of smart friends, and not a potential salary or prestige. And I think those same factors are also important for most students who succeed from other schools; in other words, doing things that make them happy.

Looking at the CEOs of the top 50 companies doesn't tell you that at all. It is almost like an article about how your kids highschool doesn't matter because all of our astronauts, rockstars, and professional atheletes have come from all over the place.
bsaunder's comment makes sense to me. Programmers from the 90s who wrote largely Windows desktop stuff had to reinvent themselves to be effective with the web and we can expect to have to do the same every few years. It's really not about Windows programming or web programming, it's about designing structures to store and expose information and that much isn't going to go away - there's only going to be more and more information. I don't see such a great growth in robotics but I'm perfectly prepared to be proven wrong in that. The line "Ultimately, I think it will be more about AI and higher level information architecture problems" strikes me as spot-on.

We've still got rather a lot of work to do.
Lori Drew Verdict Could Be Overturned | TechJaws
"Unfortunately, Paul's analogy is as far away removed from being accurate, as my mother is from being Yahoo's next CEO."

I wonder if his mother is insulted.

You know you don't _have_ to make an comparison - you can just say "Paul's analogy is inaccurate". I don't know anything about your mother (except that you think she's incapable of running yahoo), so putting that in does not help anything.
did anyone else wonder why he is wasting so much time on money on stupid blinds.

so much for cash & time efficiency.
Interesting. I wonder why HN didn't catch the URL.
This has to be the one of the most idealistic specs I've ever read:

http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/extensio...
Oh? I'd be interested in your story.
yes it costs you nothing but chances are it will earn you nothing. thats the entire point of my attributions of the web being frictionless and winner-take-all.
I'm reminded of Carl Worth's effort to port the HG guide to Git. It was mostly a search-replace effort, where the concepts were more or less the same, and the commands were similar.
"... Good to see they're planning AdBlock in advance. ..."

Does that include a mechanism to block textual adverts as well as image based adverts?
I'm calling the cops....

But on a serious note, it was suggested to us in MA that our kids deliberately have a fictitious online id, so that predators can't find them.
I still think the bullying was the issue. There was much talk when the story came out that (in point of law) an actual offence might not have been committed. So I think this represents the court casting about for some reason to convict, on some grounds, owing to public clamour. But does this set a precedent which will lead to the death of online anonymity? Not in itself, and it will be interesting to see if any other cases follow on from this one.
Books for Entrepreneurs: Extreme Programming Explained
It was a cheap shot and an unfair dig, but ultimately I still believe you don't necessarily need to be skilled in something to be able to criticize its proponents whether you're tactful or not. In as much as it was a criticism, it was a review of sorts.

Democracy relies on this concept of making crude judgements. The "Bush sucks" and "Liberals are socialists" nonsense is crass and often wrong, but people do think that way when voting. If we had to understand politics, economics, and government to a truly informed level, turnout would be in the single digit percentages ;-)

Thankfully, he got voted down to oblivion - so it seems like the majority believe it was a cheap shot and not worth paying attention to. Doesn't mean he was any less qualified to express the opinion though.
Love the design. Did you do it yourself?

1. OpenID?
2. How do I try without an account?
They failed because:

a) They didn't do anything new

b) They didn't let people do anything better, faster, or cheaper than they do now

Their tag-line is "send stuff to your friends". I already use a service that does this–it's called "email".
I still think that projects are more valuable on a resume (or, I'd look at them more if it was up to me)

yeah, maybe if you are a core contributor to the linux kernel, apache daemon, or something else of merit. but if your project is iliketodowebcrap.net, forget it. everyone and their brother has some meaningless vanity domain with some useless functionality on it these days
"... Why couldn't Pownce get enough users? ..."

Power law observed in most naturally occurring scale-free networks means there will be a few sites that have most users ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law