skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your job is most certainly to maintain a working and current toolchain. This includes programming languages and the tools that produce software in tandem with you. This isn't just for your employer, it's for the sake of your own career. Or do you want to be like those poor men who came before us, knowing and learning only COBOL, who now complain that software engineering is a young person's game?

If I interview a software engineer and they don't know how to use a version control system and actively express disdain for the concept of making sure that the progress of development is captured, then I would not recommend we hire them. Anyone who's had git-bisect save them a huge effort locating a bug would probably feel the same way.

Version control is every bit as important as your editor, debugger linker, and binary examination tools. If you don't know how to use them, you're not ready to start playing the game on a professional level.

You might say that I'm using Ad Hominem here, but I don't feel it's that way. There are minimum standards for software engineers who want to develop software professionally, and using version control and understanding why we use version control is pretty high up on the list. If a basketball player isn't ready for the NBA, it isn't Ad Hominem to tell him his game needs more work, even though he may feel very insulted by the concept.
He's making a wrong statement. If you ask 10 people who think they know software what their opinion is - you will get 10 opinions, and there is no way to know which one will work.

Stay true to your vision, the first change you should make is when you try to use it, and it does not work well, or when the first people try to use it, and you are finding out that they are not doing what they should be doing.
Some great public data sets are available at Aaron Swartz's Watchdog.net in his data directory:

http://www.watchdog.net/data/

In addition check out what the Sunlight Foundation is doing making government release more data:

http://www.sunlightfoundation.com

http://faradb.sunlightfoundation.com

http://www.sunlightlabs.com

http://services.sunlightlabs.com/api/

http://www.politicalpartytime.org
Yahoo search broken?
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=Radiohead&vs=azlyrics.com

http://www.google.com/search?as_q=Radiohead&as_sitesearch=azlyrics.com
The Web 2.0 Startup Scale: from “Hatchlings” to “Borgs”
I appreciate it as a possibility. However, according to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm, there are 1.4B (rounded down) users of the internet. The distribution across cultures is fair. With all of the scientific research, politics, economics, etc. taking place locally, nationally, and globally at any one instant, and there isn't that much of interest on the internet? It seems implausible to me. Perhaps it's true, but it seems implausible. If anything, we should encourage people to join so we can increase the odds of a greater distribution of viewpoints and ideas. Exclusionary measures will more likely produce an insulated club house of group think.
Created wikipedia.

From his wikipedia entry: "Writer Rogers Cadenhead drew attention to logs showing that in his edits to the page, Wales had removed references to Sanger as the co-founder of Wikipedia."
#nmu on csc.nmu.edu My CS department runs an unofficial server that we all SSH into and screen through IRSSI. We get a lot done that way. Makes planning our ACM/LUG meetings easier too since you can scrollback and see the previous discussions.
Ask YC: How do you use twitter/friendfeed with a lot of connections?
I've been using twitter/friendfeed for a while. But I didn't have that many connections. I would go to the Web site every so often and catch up.

Then recently, I decided to add a lot more connections to see what would happen. Now there is people on there I don't know that well (or at all), and there are a ton of updates all the time. In other words, I can no longer operate in the same mode as before.

If you are someone with a lot of connections, how do you get valuable use out of these services? Do you just use one of these alert things and let the messages pop up all the time? Do you just ignore things you don't see in the moment?
Don't Get Depressed, It's Not 1929
They just don't index azlyrics.com. So what?
What exactly are they trying to say? What they don't like and want to change?

The Communist Manifesto was similarly arrogant and angry, but at least somewhat understandable. :)
"Removing the Glass-Steagall Act is a large part of why the government felt the need to dump 700billion in the financial markets."

Really? Where's your evidence? I'm not saying you're wrong, but that's a pretty big leap.
I think for a startup weekend type event you have to define success as any company that follows through after the weekend and gets a non trivial amount of users.

Profits, in general, take years and may not be the best way to define success for startups (at least young ones). Profits should be the goal however.

Getting acquired is a good measure but this too, typically, takes years.

Issuing dividends...is just too far into the future for most startups.
I wish not to disrupt the mood of the population on HN, but a question.

When will the majority of tech entrepreneurs begin to build products and services targeted at more than, say, a few hundred people?

It seems most of the tech startups are heralded by tech websites, and the only people using the services, are... you guessed it: other tech people. Such a limited base of
customers!

Lastly, why are there so many derivative based startups, who piggy back and rely on another service? Are the dollars going to be realized when you cash out by being acquired by a company that wants to add you as a feature?

I just want to know.
Delightfully Wrong About Git
Textflow: Collaborative Editing Made Easy
Use vesting which will allow you to hire him now without writing over a significant chunk of equity to him before he has proven himself. In a scenario where two people are "equals" (more or less), vesting should usually be done for both. However it seems like you are (or want to be) the "employer" or at least the "senior" founder here and he is the "employee". And if he agrees to this take on things, he may be agreeable to doing vesting for his share alone.
what did you use for search?

custom or acts_as_xapian/ferret/solr ?

Curious cause we had a discussion of rails search at the last local rb meetup
Accurate!

I classified myself as INTP after reading the descriptions.

My-Type classified me as INTP after I took the test.
Oh ok - I didn't really know how long startup weekends have been going for. So now we have to define what a non-trivial amount of users/traffic is :).
> It really says something about the sad state of IDEs for most languages.

I haven't seen any IDE that has a text editor that's anywhere near the likes of Emacs or Vim. I'm sure people wouldn't mind some of the functionality of an IDE, but rate having a good text editor a more important feature.
Exactly. Most people can't tell if software is going to be usefule to them until you put it into their hands and get them to try it out - even experienced programmers have problems with this.

As an example, I recently wrote an application. The application was designed to meet a need that I had that no software package seems to currenty meet - specifically allowing me to create a program to follow on my exercise bike at home whose idea of an onboard computer is a counter that gives a fake number of metres ridden since the start of the session. As a secondary goal, I wanted to use this app to learn Cocoa for the Mac, which would lead me into iPhone development. As a tertiary goal, I thought it would be nice to put the app on sale - after all, I can hardly be unique right? If I see the need for this app, surely others could too!

So, after three months of work, I had a pretty nice app. No known bugs, easy to use, reasonably pretty, but of course, hey, it doesn't do a lot except roughly copy the functionality of any half-decent exercise bike's on-board computer, so nothing special. I knew that the app was useful - I had been using it daily for about 2 months at this point, and it was actually really good at getting me to work up a sweat. But then I tried to explain to family and friends what this app did. Every single one of them wanted to know how you plugged the computer into the bike, which of course you can't do, because the bike has a brain dead onboard computer with no way of connecting anything, hence the need to write this piece of software (for the curious, the program simply keeps a running counter based on a timer and your program - if you've programmed a higher speed for a block of the program, the counter increments faster. The user has to keep the bike's counter up with the computer's counter).

The problem was that everyone has the model of the exercise bike computer that changes the gears of the bike the higher the bar is on the little readout. My system can't change the gears, not being connected to the bike, instead it just makes you pedal faster (which achieves the same goal of making you work harder). But because the app goes against what people expect, it was next to impossible to get them enthused about it without sitting them down on a bike, with the app running next to them, and making them do a program. Then they understood what the point was, but to this day I have never succeeded in getting someone to understand the app's main usage just by explaining it. I eventually decided to not put the thing on the market, because I couldn't see any easy solution to the marketing difficulties, and anyhow, I had already achieved goals #1 and #2 with the project.

All of that to say that asking for people's opinions on an idea is very unlikely to work very well, unless you have really good communication skills, and even then, the person listening needs to have a certain capacity to envision something that doesn't exist, and not everyone can do that.
Problem with NameCheap?
Sarbanes Oxley has been a disaster. I used to work in audit for Deloitte; I still have nightmares.

I would never ever take one of my companies public (if we're lucky enough to get that far :-D).
I can only speak for those I know.

Both Skribit and Twitpay are incorporated.

Skribit will hire its first full time person in January upon closing a small round. The company has significant user traction: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/skribit.com/?metric=uv
Applications to attend/present at Startup Riot now available
Which tech certifications are hot in a cool job market?
Killer open source network monitoring tools
That's pretty bad. Is it out of date or just overly fanboy-esque? It would be cool to put some feature list comparisons somewhere.

Right now most of this stuff seems really anecdotal because people that understand one system mostly use that system exclusively.
The 'Casual Game Industry' is much to young to jump to the conclusion that it is counter-cyclical. Rather, I think we are seeing a particular industry growing at a time the larger economy happens to be shrinking. This shouldn't be impossible to imagine.

Several things have contributed to the growth of the industry in the last few years that far outweigh the impacts of the macro-economy:

* Ubiquity of fast computers, capable browsers (IE6 even)and broadband

* Increased comfort with the web from older generations

* Venues like Xbox 360 arcade

* etc...
I asked my recruiter specifically if they were in a hiring freeze (I'm in the middle of the application process now), and she was very adamant that they were not. If they were, they would lay off the whole HR department, except for a skeleton crew needed for benefits and such. After all, why spend ~40M/year on recruiters if you're not recruiting?
Freenode: #x264dev, #x264, #avisynth, #ffmpeg, #videolan, #mplayer, #ffmpeg-devel, #mplayerdev, #xvid, #uncov

Rizon: #darkhold, #cccp
Note that Startup Riot is an all day affair with the aim of connecting entrepreneurs with the folks that can help them. Service providers (lawyers, accounts, etc.) that are not sponsors are totally screened out. We're taking applications to present from companies in any industry, at any stage, and with any needs. You don't have to be raising money, you don't have to be an Internet company, and you don't have to be in Atlanta to be selected to present. But there are only 70 slots which are probably going to go fast! Earlier apps to present will have a greater opportunity of getting a slot.
freenode: #utah, #lojban, #perl6
irc.perl.org: #parrot
I also hang out in my ISP's IRC channel for convenient occasional tech support.
Glass-Steagall Act had little to do with the cause of the collapse but if you trace the companies that received money some of them merged and become larger in ways that Glass-Steagall would have prevented. Nobody really cared if subsection of these organizations failed but the companies where structured in such a way that the CDS market and bad mortgage debt infected otherwise sound institutions.

PS: For a slightly different take: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/would-glass-steagall-s...{3AA33D85-AD38-41B4-B300-033235B5734A}

Edit: that link is not working goto http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/would-glass-ste... then click on Go to Article from MarketWatch » at the bottom.
" but not so much in Europe."

Ummm, not so much. France at least has loads of people of African descent - I would think the percentage must be around about the same as that for the US, just by eyeballing what I see on the street in Paris, Marseille, Lille etc.
Probably the most important thing is growth.
Startup Valuations, Business Models and Social Leverage
What an ignorant jerk.
Sorry for not including the link. InGameNow (http://www.ingamenow.com) has released a developer API with live scoring
Con games are very prosperous, except to those who are being conned. Like any other pyramid scheme, Wall Street relies on an endless supply of new suckers to feed it from the bottom. The deregulation of the 90's opened the flood gates to suckerdom (retail investors and 401k) and the new suckers came pouring in. In the meantime Wall Street invented new carnival games such as mortgage backed securities and derivatives to pull in large foreign investors. But like any pyramid scheme, as soon as the promised return on investment fails to materialize, the suckers wise up and walk away, the bottom falls out. The government then shuts down the carnival, but investors forget these painful lessons after about 20 years or so after which the market is ripe for another boom, and then the carnival comes back to town.
Slicehost vs Linode
I would not just give me 50% for walking in the door. I wrote a long article addressing this a short time back:
http://bit.ly/StartupEquity
Retention. Turn-over. Keeping a "hot list". Getting rid of under-performing groups by replacing them with new blood.

Those are some of the reasons. Also sometimes HR departments are just several months behind the times.

Not trying to rain on your parade. I just wouldn't take that argument too seriously in a general situation. In this particular situation, I think Google is doing great and believe they probably are hiring.
How to answer the phone
As anyone that has ever started a company can tell you the hard part is not spending a weekend building a cool prototype - anyone can do that. There's a long way to a sustainable company.

"How to build a basic product in one weekend" would probably be more appropriate.
I doubt c|net is giving up search.com, but you have a good idea
That's 50/50 "with vesting", and yes vesting is a good idea.
Agreed.

It's interesting that SarBox has so many advocates. After all, it sounds good on paper -- kind of like killing flies with nuclear radiation. Definitely shows that the government means business.

In my opinion, it seems that when a crisis occurs, we have a tendency to over-react (SarBox, TSA, etc) Politicians would rather be remembered for "doing something" even if later on it turns out to be a huge CF.
Did anyone else spot Safari 4.0 on Steve's page? Is that some Apple folks trying out their latest offering, perhaps? I'm pretty sure WebKit nightly comes out as WebKit.
Our products are very-much closed source, so things like Github are of no use to us.

For what it's worth, GitHub offers paid repositories for just this case; open-source repositories are free, but you can pay to make your repositories private. Even the biggest plan is only $200/month; see http://github.com/plans for more information.
Oh and while I'm thinking about it, this is a cool tool but I'm not sure of how much it will do to pressure browser manufacturers into improving. Obviously Steve's suggestions have gone into Chrome but beyond that I wonder how much influence he has...
If you read Reason enough, you'll know that they take this position -- that market liberalization makes the world better -- on pretty much every issue.
I agree: I don't think that the theoretical oligarchy should have complete control. But moderation control is different. We might get a more civilized community if the upvotes and downvotes were controlled somehow.

It won't happen, but I think it would be an interesting experiment.
Regarding #5. I just ran stats for a series of four Web 2.0 conferences covering the last year and found that attendee usage of OpenID actually dropped. I'm not sure what that means, maybe the attendee demographic changed, but it seemed like a sign that 2009 might not be the year that OpenID explodes.
See my comment about forum moderators. That's not an oligarchy because each of the admins has near-unlimited power. An oligarchy would provide checks and balances.
I would love to see a site that tracks predictors' prediction records.

It seems that almost all predictors' (or maybe all of them) have a dismal accuracy record. (Especially in the financial sector as we've seen this year)
I haven't been able to find an IRC client I like for the Mac, so for the last few months I've been completely clean.
"Cargo Cult Science", by Richard Feynman
Which has no bearing on the validity of this particular piece, right? It's just a blanket statement about the source. You would take this particular piece and argue it on its merits, right? Not imply that because the publication has one pattern or another, the reasoning (ugh) is somehow tainted.

I just want to make sure that you are simply making an observation, and not trying to impeach the article by casting aspersions on the source.
True, not much on offer as IDEs for other languages. At least Eclipse gives a code outline for JavaScript, though.
The last advice you will ever need.
" Do not listen to other people's advices. Save this one"
I stopped memorizing syntax a long time ago. It's been a few years and an the only thing I can recall about C's pointer syntax is ^ and & but the specifics are long gone. Not that long ago I had to look up the conditional shorthand (expression)? true: false in java etc. I have used around 12 different languages and I try and forget the stuff I am not using or I will mix and match syntax that does not work for the language I am programming in.

PS: I was classified with a learning disability back in school so this could just be me.
Who lays off the layers-off? HR departments look after themselves.
"I went to see Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies in 1972 and I think I am still there"
Incidentally, this in reverse is an excellent way to gauge character and experience. When people ask you what you think, if you're bluntly critical of their idea, the ones who accept your criticism and figure out ways to fix their idea (if it was broken) are the ones who are capable enough to see the value in good ideas. The ones who get mad at your criticism are going nowhere fast.

Holds true across nearly every category. Anybody who makes things and gets offended when people don't like it won't find it easy to progress.
The Incredible IDEO Global Chain Reaction Experience
Yes, but the decades are not related to digits. Two is "iki" while twenty is "yirmi".
Lay off the entire HR department? The only reason you'd do that is if you were in a permanent hiring freeze death spiral. Recruiting works as a pipeline. So even if you're in a hiring freeze, which Google likely is, you still want to have folks lined up for interviews.

Worst case scenario is that you end up interviewing a bunch of folks and can't offer them a position. However, if you just stop recruiting activity altogether then you'll have more than a month worth of lead time to start getting new hires after the hiring freeze is lifted.
Between XeTeX and LyX, you can get all the nice professional fonts and kerning settings of professional desktop publishing suites, along with all the power of LaTeX. A good set of examples is shown on the Beauty of LaTeX page (http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex).
I thought the same thing. Here's my translation (don't hate me):

Let us make an end also to the wasters of disk space who clutter up our machines and profane our lightning-fast memories!

Translation: Down with Windows!

An end to the quick-money architecture of the jobbers of the prefabricated!

Translation: Down with uhh ... uhhh ???

An End to the common run of program decorators, the fakers of technology, the masters of software cosmetology who sell themselves, and the slovenly and thick headed "managers"!

Translation: Down with consultants!
I think an honest appraisal would say that Clinton-GOP governance gave us both the prosperity of the 90s and today's crisis.

My thoughts exactly. It's not easy to look at prosperity, before a storm, and identify it's contribution to the storm. But the correlation is interesting enough to make blanket statements regarding prosperity and deregulation subject to no conclusion.
Not only that, but it seems like he was penalized for very common quick to fix errors. I'm not the best programmer ever but I always forget to initialize a data structure or forget a semicolon. I always catch the error when compiling or testing. It's like penalizing someone for a grammatical mistake. Some make more mistakes than others but no one is perfect.
I think the problem with startups isn't that they target a few hundred people. They probably target a couple hundred thousand people. The problem is that it is invariably THE SAME people... and that the people they target do not pay money for the things that startups sell. To the extent that startups sell anything. Because they realize they can't. Because their target does not pay money for software or services. (They'll pay for some technology -- iPods, for example. But they won't buy what startups are selling. Sorry. They also won't buy anything from anyone who runs ads on the Internet, which is why "We get a billion eyeballs and then we MONETIZE!" is going to be a tough row to hoe the next few years.)

I have a teeny tiny software business. 95% of my customers are female. The average age is, making an estimate, north of 35. I deal with a lot of @aol and @roadrunner email addresses. Despite the abject disbelief I get when I tell my software writing buddies the story, it really is possible to sell software to folks who do not know what RSS is and do not care that their websites validate.

So why do I feel like I'm one of the only guys trying to do it?
This particular writer seems to always be stoked on life. A solidly curious mind.
I'm curious too. I've enjoyed his blog posts ever since they first appears on Hacker News.
Worry not, take that as an opportunity. I'm sure you're a talented hacker. I've been reading your articles and I guess you like to learn a lot on your own. Match made in heaven for a startup guy. I sense that had you been employed by Google you might have left it after some time to start something on your own. Why not now :)
Analog Debugging is Hard