skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's actually worse than that - there's a lot to unlearn in order to be effective with tools like Rails. It's like approaching Smalltalk and asking where's the source code.
Where's the link to the Kickstarter page so I can contribute?

Only 1/2 :-)
He gave a couple at the pycon conference. Why don't you pretend they responded with killing email and come up with the better solution for task inbox...
Hi Tim,

Yeah, a revenue split model would work much better but unfortunately Marco hasn't chosen an 'official' Android client just yet (and doesn't seem disposed to) and has mandated the subscription model for all third-party apps. It's understandable, given his wariness of Android (which is seemingly somewhat justified.)
I am going to make a concerted effort to make the app appeal to users who don't know about Instapaper or the model, though. I've been concentrating on providing the best possible app to those who already understood both of these to the detriment of new users who don't know the service at all, the logic being that if you know what Instapaper is, it's because you're already aware of the excellent iOS apps.

Ryan (the developer of Papermill)
You are in a closet, looking at a closed door. How big is the house?
The move to wireless is one part Apple's sake, and one part for users (no parts left over for developers, unfortunately). People tend to favor wireless accessories and associate a higher value with them. In some cases it just makes more sense- people want to use an accessory without handing over their iPhone (I'm looking at you, speaker docks)

The cost may be a wash, but it really does level the playing field.
Holy shit, people still use Ruby on Rails?

Lisp programmer here. I would never touch the thing.
Ad units do appear differently from organic results - this was ventilated in the original case, where the judgement was that there was definitely misleading conduct - on behalf of the advertiser.

It seems that the on appeal, the full bench decided that google was actually responsible - given their algorithms were responsible for placing the ad in the context.

This doesn't seem to be quite the same as the ambush marketing you mention. That would be more placing an ad for "dell" when searching for "elegant mobile personal computer".
Arbitrary huh...

My two long term pet peeves for which I would be most happy to help lobby to get them a hearing:

1) Faster than light travel
2) Create a robot that carries it's own power supply, communication device, and webcams that would allow me to traipse up and down any path in Rocky Mountain National Park in real time so that I can take a hike for 20 minutes when I need a break without the requisite plane travel and hotel bill

I suspect pg would be willing to pay for at least number 1 :-)
A thought that occurred to me - another metric we use in the real word would be what I'm calling "solidness" or "weight." I.e. if you see a house and a similarly sized tent, the apparent difference we see between the two is weight - we can probably pick up the tent and walk away with it.

In a sense, that's a useful way to describe software to non-technical users. We can throw something quick and dirty together, but it would be light as a feather, and carried away by any kind of load whatsoever. Or we can build something more solid to last longer, but it should be clear that that will take more effort.
Serious Mass by ON
I don't completely understand the 'unfair advantage.' If the aim of the game was to make one where everyone is completely equal, sure, but who would want that? It's boring, it's anti-progression, unrealistic (Not everyone is equal), etc.

I forever want to be in a situation where if I have more experience I will do better. This doesn't mean in every sense as I always expect to learn more in general and also from those who have less experience or whom I'm helping. Also, I hope the reverse is always true when I'm with those who have much more experience than I do like professors and tutors at university.
You can use png masks to create an icon, and then change the background color of the element below it. You can also use image scaling to make the icon any size you need.

http://www.cssbakery.com/2009/06/background-image.html

SenchaTouch does this for all their button icons.

The downside is that you can't use spritesheets, because each image needs to be inserted with an image tag, not a background image.
Maybe you can try building a search engine for Hacker News.
Question: Did you spend 72 hours straight doing everything you can to make your application reflect who you really are and what you have to offer?

Want to solve a pain point? why not start with your own. Clearly, getting noticed and recognized by YC Partners is a pain point for you and many others.

Almost 100 years ago Napolean Hill offered a solution. Spend a few weeks researching your target, and approach them with a real value proposition, an offer they can't refuse.

Or work on the problem of getting noticed by YC partners by hacking the application process, identifying all the entry points to reach them, create a platform for incubators to crowdsource out their problems and pain points to their applicants, or just find a way to become friends with their mothers.

If there is a will, there is a way goes both ways. If you really had a burning desire, you would have found a way, and if you haven't found a way, your will isn't up to the task.
American countries?
Who writes games in fucking Java? Idiots, I'll tell you who.
Why would he limit the number of potential solutions to one? If they wanted to try this it seems like it would better to put the challenge to everyone.
I wonder how far this concept will be extended. Will there be a full OS running on the in-game CPU, with I/O protocols to interface with the ship's systems? Will you be able to cripple your enemies' ships by writing malware, a la Independence Day?

Taken to its fullest extent, this seems like not just a game, but also a simulated world in which one can learn and practice actual engineering skills.
Why don't you just build something other people want? Don't focus too much on what YC partners want, focus on what other people want(conversely if you do that YC partners will want you, not vice-versa).
That's why the share links where created.

When I share subscriber-only LWN content (which I do occasionally), I specifically call out the quality of the content and the fact that it's a subscription site. One of the few I actually do pay money to.
must be great to be a tech-lawyer in 2.0 world.
Good ole arch linux. At least you have a shot at current packages.

As for Ubuntu, it's a sad state. Installing ruby-rvm and/or rubygems from the the repositories can break your whole system.
Instead of submitting a request, take a shot at building one. If you open source it maybe others can help you build it.

Just a thought.
I hope it ships soon, because it's the only thing that will be able to keep me from wasting so much time on Minecraft
Yeah and Linus coded git in a weekend...

The infuriating thing for me is that people don't get that these monumentally fast development achievements still involved a massive expenditure of personal effort. Thus the "It'll take a few days of coding" customers of the gp are only more annoying if they cite examples like yours, expecting a complete product in a few days.
Awesome, free grammar advice from someone who writes:

"I have got a problem"

Thanks for the LOLz...
The flipside is that there are a surprising number of organizations with lots of money that haven't figured out a better way of distributing it, so applications can still be a good way of getting funds. One of my acquaintances, for example, just got $100k in seed funding (with no equity in return) entirely based on a 15-page application sent to a funding body, having had no previous contact with the funder.
You forgot micropayments for hats.
I suppose it's up to me to be the "Debbie Downer" on this one.

First off, I like the recommendations, and the learning algorithm seems decent. However the UI continues to give me nightmares. I setup a list similar to what I have in Zite or Flipboard. For some reason only Chrome will let me actually go to the list and scroll it. For everything else (IE, Firefox, Opera) I can see the list, I can click on the list, but I can't scroll the list.

While I like the recommendations, I would also like the ability to have more control over sources, and to control the refresh rate. Yes I "get" they think that isn't needed if they are doing this right. I just respectfully disagree.

Just my .02 worth. I wish the team well, and hope they have an Android App version of this eventually as I would love to have the pretty on my Sony Tablet S...
In the US, currently, if an individual donates more than $200 to certain types of political campaigns, that individual's name, address, occupation and employer must be included in campaign finance disclosures. $1000 > $200, so that's why the information is there.

As an aside: my previous job was in journalism, and generally in that field there's a (self-enforced) ethical code against making such donations largely because the employer's name is disclosed and could lead people to assume endorsement by a news outlet.
Agreed. Figuring out a way around the admissions process is the admissions process.
Brendan Eich homophobe?
I would venture to say the application process worked like clock-work. YC is looking for people to mentor, educate, and smooth out the bumpy road ahead for, to discover modest people, who acknowledge their weaknesses and are willing to humble themselves and learn from everyone around them.
5 Weeks After Launching Loft Resumes: $10K+ in Revenue, 200K in Pageviews
I know C# is a great C styled language but calling PHP too verbose is a little... strange imo.

When you say you "tried PHP" I'm assuming you didn't start with a framework of some sort? Writing straight PHP scripts will probably rot your brain.

http://fuelphp.com/
or
http://laravel.com/

Would be my two cents from the PHP crowd.
Before you sign up, Twitter asks you to give Prismatic permission to "Post tweets for me", why?
Apply to StartEngine.com
Life sms message quotes free - Cool/Decent sms
Do it PG! Do it! I want to see a slam dunk! I want to see EPIC failure! I want to see if they're all talk or can walk the walk. This is like the reality tv episode of entrepreneurship. Just once, I want to watch and wait with baited breath as the challenge is issued, the gauntlet is thrown down, the problem put out and the solution successfully solved! Don't make it easy, make it tougher than any problem one of your own companies can solve. Make it so tough people will look around and wonder, can it be even done? Also, make them play dramatic music at their office constantly for all 72 hours.
Hey Edwin,

We agree and we're actively working on all the issues you bring up. Stick with us, it's really a big endeavor and it will improve quickly.
Beautiful design and fun app, looks great, congrats!
The amazing implication here is that if the game were to use a sufficiently realistic physics engine and realistically model materials and energy generation/consumption, then the ships and control systems that you design could actually be potentially viable designs for real-world spaceships!

I doubt even Notch is able to accurately and fully emulate reality itself just yet, though.
Hey guys, the list of problems to solve is up: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
Idea: Web based Skype client.
That is all. Skype should just go ahead and create this. We have the technology!
How has curvedns been for you? I need DNSCurve for a research project of mine but I'm very frightened to see that curvedns is the only forwarding implementation and gdnsd is the only authoritative implementation. Speaking of implementations, what the heck do you use for a client/resolver!?
Should there be a button so he could have some feedback?
"You're actions speak so loudly that I cannot hear what you say."

One of my favorite quotes of all time, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. If you are really more than what comes across on paper, you should have things to show that extend beyond what is on paper. Claiming you are smart and can execute will get you nowhere. I'd venture to guess that everybody who applies believes that they have that in spades.

But the larger question I have, and continue to have, is why people continue to view entrepreneurship as an elite club to which you must be allowed entrance. No offense to Y-Combinator or any other startup incubator, as I'm sure the experience is fantastic. I just think anybody approaching this as some kind of bridge that you must cross to achieve success is misguided. Successful startups were born long before incubators and they were built by people who knew how to execute and had the wherewithal to do so. The very fact that you have to plead to make the case that you can execute shows in many ways that you can't. An incubator should be viewed as one avenue to ramp up traction and execution, not a permission slip to do so.
A reality show of this nature actually is a pretty good idea.
There existed a programming language called Go before Google came along with their programming language also named Go.

Not that anyone knew of the older Go before the whole naming debacle, but it may not just be anti-Google trolling to refer to it as Google Go.

/devils advocate hat off.
I think its silly to expect he can't keep his own political views on issues without having them muddied up with his work. Javascript is great technology. I couldn't care less what he did in his free time.

There is something to be said for the double standard here.

Pro Prop8 isn't necessary homophobic. The question is about marriage and there are a whole bunch of legitimate reason someone who likes gays might not wish them permission to marry (not that it should be their choice in the first place).
The Nokia Lumia 900 review - Windows Phone Mango
VAGdashCOM
Yet amazingly the 40,000 "OH HAI SEXISM" posts that blanketed HN for the last week don't?
Thanks Toby, really glad you've enjoyed it. We can get so much better, but at least we finally do have a foundation. :)
Nice write up.

Want to add two other reasons we're horrible at making estimates.

1. Expectations.
2. No widely accepted language for writing requirements.

Re: 1. Expectations are just hard to manage. Even when you do get "So the site's pretty simple" - the set of features in their brain is totally different from the set of features in your brain. Alas, it'll take more than "all it needs to do is X, Y, Z" to fix this process.

Re: 2. Is there a professional software consulting company that has solved this problem? I say there isn't. I also say that with the advent of Agile/Lean Startup methodologies, it'll probably never happen - "No, we don't write reqs, we have stories you need to approve." uh huh, okay. For writing requirements, I got really damn fond of Cucumber, but then the lean-ux took off, and that shifted everybody's priorities.

Bottom line, until there's a widely accepted way to communicate design and functionality, making bad estimates will always be easy to do
Small program #58: http://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=10604

Unlike the others, this one was actually found in production.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a software engineer.
http://insidesearch.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/search-quality-h...

Based on the second item of that list, might soon get some emoticon love on Google search.
Ouch. We never said, or even meant to imply we were somehow better than the awesome people at Y Combinator, or frankly better than anyone else. All we're trying to do here is show that we're worth a second look and maybe a conversation.
I guarantee both will happen within a week of the game's release.
I really wish the e-mail field of the profile was on a non-crawlable page.
Awesome roundup of Sass resources.
Google search problems - is it just me?
I have had two problems recently:
a) content farms - more and more of them breaking thru google's defences
b) more disturbingly - getting NO results at all for searches that obviously should get results. I find this one very disturbing. So disturbing I ran the same queries on Bing (forgive me father for I have sinned) and got perfectly sensible results. So we have queries that (i) make total intuitive sense that there will be answers (ii) Bing finds such answers, and yet (iii) I get NO results from Google. This latter case is very new for me. I have been using google forever and am an experienced user and this phenomena is only over the last (approx) 4 weeks.

Has anyone else seen this kind of thing? Or should I start publishing searches to demonstrate (b)?
I would love if they did!
Yes, but relating to and understanding the problem that you are trying to solve is the difficult part. You may create a solution to the problem, but any programmer can do that. I always viewed YC as being difficult to get into because you had to do this part prior to applying. If PG does give these guys something to make, then maybe that'd be a good answer to the question on the application that asks what your greatest hack ever was - it'd be turning the tables on PG and getting him to give you something to solve! Clever. :)
We only use that permission to allow you to share stories you find with Prismatic. We'll never tweet unless you ask us to.
We have the beginnings of an OSX port to homebrew: https://juju.ubuntu.com/OSX

Any help in this area would be much appreciated!
>Edit: What do you think it says to neutral readers when facts, reasons, links are downvoted?

I think neutral readers are smart enough to see your pervasive trolling and love of ignorant apples to oranges comparisons for what they are.

My money is that you work for an organisation that competes with Google (you habitually troll almost any Google thread), you work on a competing language project, or perhaps both. In either case your trolling is really getting pretty desperate.
I am a beginning stats student. I took the AP class in high school, and have been doing independent work since. Predicting voters, playing with data sets, using a bit of Python to try to make general solutions, and other non serious but non trivial actions. Bayesian solutions have always required more work from me, even when they seemed the optimal way to solve a problem. I still don't entirely understand how to work with continuous distributions of hypotheses, partially because I lack the deep mathematical intuition at the moment. I don't blame the math, but I do think that much of the time the Bayesian treatment can be more challenging. I suspect that this is why non-Bayesian techniques remain so popular.
"...not that it should be their choice in the first place."
what the heck does that mean????????
I think it's really funny that all the comments telling people they won't get noticed are actually boosting it to the top where they are very likely to get noticed.

Humanity ftw!
Given that is well known Go was developed mainly in a 64bit environment and that the 64bit compilers produce much faster code and have been much more tested than the 32bit toolchain, to the point that some people have complained that Go favours 64bit systems too much (if for no other reasons because that is what the main developers use), your whole argument is clearly nonsense, that you are a well known troll with some kind of fixation with bashing Google is just coincidence.
Lumia 900 review
To the down voter... My point is important.

There are different paths to take, and my experience with people getting MBAs is that they fit in to 1 of 3 groups:

1) Business person who wants to continue being a business person. (by far, they get the biggest value in salary bump on average) Their skill set before the MBA fits perfectly with their improved skills and degrees. They are highly sought after by employers and the MBA program is designed to help them get jobs.

2) Technical person (including all types of engineers, many non-programmers) that are in a technical field because they saw a good $50k-$70k entry salary out of undergrad and wanted a safe job. They saw the higher avg salary post MBA, did some quick math and determined making $120k-$160k post graduation and taking a 2 year vacation would be cool (they saw their business friends do no work in undergrad compared to them.)

3) A strange, hyper-motivated group that comes from all types of backgrounds. They want to start a company and it is in their blood. They can't shake it, they read hacker news, they study hard, they participate in class, case competitions, networking events etc.

They are the exception, but they will found something. It may not be the next google or even a tech startup at all, but it will be something.

Group 1) Gets the 2nd best offers from big and small companies, they get to do cool jobs for the most part.

Group 2) Depends somewhat on the person, but they are at a disadvantage and they thought they were smarter than the business people, but the business people know business and typically best the technical people in interviews. They do fine if they leave their comfort zone, but if they don't they are screwed.

Group 3) gets the best offers, best connections and enjoys it the most. If you believe you are in group 1 or 3, your return on an MBA is amazing. If you are in group 2, it is questionable. But, if you only did the tech job for the money, an MBA probably won't solve your problems, nor will any other degree.

--I see constant posts about MBAs, and how bad they are for people. They are bad for the wrong people, they are amazing for the right people.
Thanks, Alex. What do you mean about the non intrusive point - something about the ongoing interactions within the product or things like bootstrapping interests from twitter?
Awesome! Must be such an amazing feeling to receive that first payment. I'm about a month away from my first launch and I'm terrified of launching and then hearing.... crickets. So congrats to you!

Had a look at the product. Looks v.solid. Just a couple of things:

- When I attach a file via /projects/project_name/stories/ it completes the upload then the files seems to disappear? What I mean is that the progress indicator goes to 100% and nothing else happens. Then if I go back to root and back to stories there is no file.

- I think you need labels on the 4 symbols on the left hand side. The only one which is self evident is the '?'. The others I have to hover over to find out about and that is annoying from a UX pov.

Cheers and good luck :)
This is a great idea. I would be a use from day one!
Thanks! It was a lot of fun and proven very useful.

Biggest reason is conciseness (less code), followed by ease of debugging.

When using JXPath or Jaxen, you have to use contexts. Pseudo code (from memory):

Node n = new Node( "ugh" );
// add some children here
JXPathContext c = new JXPathContext( n );
NodeList list = c.eval( "child" );
for( int i = 0; i < list.length(); i++ )
{
Node m = (Node) list.get( i );
...
}

Whereas LOX does it like this:

Element e = new Element( "ugh" );
// Add some children here
for( Element e : e.find( "child" ))
{
...
}

I do a lot of ETL work (XML -> SQL). The ability to debug (interactive inspection) speeds development. I'm sure you've tried to debug XPath expressions. Not easy.

Happily, all of the LOX's object implement toString() method to render their XML content. And the evaluation of path expressions, while not easy, is feasible. Whereas with JXPath or Jaxen, it's damned near impossible. (I've written a few object adapters for JXPath; getting them right is black magic.)
This is basically right.
First of all, the GCC ones are all GCC versions that are at least 4 years old

(The clang versions are from fairly early on in clang's development, but i dont' remember how old)

All that said, ICC uses a frontend from a company called EDG.
They produce C and C++ frontends. They are a 5 person company, but produce very thorough, very well tested, and very well documented frontends. It is not surprising that they are difficult to crash. Language frontends is all they do.