skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having painstakingly gone through the process of writing 35 page Grant Proposals for a hospital and getting funding from the government on all three occasions, I can assure you that the application process was just a formality and legal requirement.

The funding came through because the grantor had a relationship with the department heads that received the funds.

Obviously, you need to meet the required criteria, and a perfectly crafted application is a requirement, but all things being equal it boils down to relationships.
Disclosure: I am currently a software PM

I actually think that the same principles apply to _any_ form of creative activity.

Let's say I'm going to write a 300 page book. I can take my typical wpm speed, do some math on it, and say that it will take me X hours to do this. A book, on the surface, should fit into the "size and speed" heuristic. But of course, this is nowhere near the case. No decent piece of writing ever comes out without many many iterations of rewrites.

Writing a piece of music? Same thing. Making a clay pot? Even great masters take many tries before coming up with something worthy of the public eye.

Software, even to my novice eye, is similar. But the difference is that the person with zero experience doesn't know instinctively that software also falls into this iterative, creative process. We've been trained and educated to know that writing, composing, and sculpting are iterative creative processes that don't have a linear measurement scheme. We spent hours upon hours as children and young adults writing and rewriting, drawing and redrawing. We know from personal experience that things hardly go "as planned".

But for something completely foreign to us, such prior knowledge is absent. We have no idea. So we take what we can see, and extrapolate. "Hey, I see just one web page, that can't be so hard... (insert mysterious thought process) how about XYZ days?"

The fact that I took a few years of programming courses in college (I was an EE Major) has probably helped me in keeping things sane. I've written enough code myself to know instinctively that both development and debugging are far from linear processes. I know that I have no way of estimating how much time it will take devs who are much more capable than I am to develop/fix something. So I cede to the guys who know best. I take their word and estimates in good faith, and focus on swatting the 'flies' away so the team can focus on the task. What if we don't hit our estimates? Well too bad, but stuff happens. Time to reassess, buckle down, and go again.
I discovered the "verbatim" option under the "More search tools" link on the left hand side recently.

http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

It's not as convenient as an extension or a script, of course.
If you consider the conclusion of this post, it means that indie game developers that create a 1-hitter over 10 years of hard labor to finally end up being acquired and rich is a waste of time.

And I'm fine with that conclusion
so reverse the question - "why does programming small things take so long?" (assuming x, y and z were relatively standard). is there a niche in this somewhere that maybe some % of the guru class should be focusing on 'making typical, trivial'? ie, we found 70% of websites include these features - download this template, push run and you have a website running. change text on front page manually might actually be good enough for 20% of the population...
When building the new Facebook photo viewer, we would ship a redesign to a small percentage of users, look at its metrics impact, and ship another redesign 2-3 days later based on the data. Simply being able to execute on something like this for 72 hours, no matter how blindly you do it, is indicative of a worthwhile skill that many people don't have.
Show HN: Starsling, a social goal-tracking site. Applying for YCS12
Just wanted to tell everyone about our idea that we submitted.

We want to remain transparent in our process.

We have noticed a lot of people becoming interested in the quantified self with the release of such devices as the Jawbone UP, Nike Fuel Band, and the FitBit. We think there can be a better network for all of the people that currently use those devices and also people who want to manually track their progress.

Starsling will be a social goal tracking site where you can see how your friends are doing on their goals, give them motivation, and challenge or join your friends in their goals. Create goals such as Meditate 7 times a week, or read 48 books in a year. Starsling will also allow you to track your goals with or without the aid of such monitoring devices like the Jawbone UP and display your data in a helpful way.

If you have any feedback or thoughts please let us know!

jeffreykam & gregsqueeb

http://starsling.com/
Wouldn't it just be simpler to use an x86 CPU and qemu? Or a sandbox'ed process, etc, etc.

I'm sort of thinking that if you used an x86 CPU there are so many existing tools that could be used for it instead of having to write new compilers, etc.
I hope people don't get too hung up on the numbers thing to miss out on the great advice you give. With all the factors that contribute to a startups success, I think this post really nails some critical ones:

- Create a list of people interested before you launch

- Be proactive with support, consider it a sales tool

- Have a great first use experience, that's when people are deciding to use your system.

Great post and well done on your success so far.
Hover.com and ghandi.net aren't the cheapest but they are easy to use and don't bombard you with up sells and ads
In retrospect, would you have done them in that order, or done Rock Health first and YC second, or does it not matter?

I don't think anyone can touch YC for the core value proposition, but domain-specific programs (for medical, enterprise, government, ...) might make some sense, and I could see the value in something like StartX as a pre-YC while-still-in-college thing.
Are there any games currently in existence that would allow someone to fly a ship ala space sim and also move around in their ship interior?

An RPG'ish space game that just let me tool around as if it was Han Solo inside the Millennium Falcon, exploring the universe would be really sweet. Doubly so if it let me and a buddy fly inside a tangible cockpit.

I'd love to know if such a game currently exists.
As tempting as it sounds I don't think there is any way to release the negative results without looking evil :).
ASCII was actually invented in the US in the 1960s, as a
standardised way of encoding text on a computer. ASCII
defined 128 characters, that's a character for half of the
256 possible bytes in an 8-bit computer system.

Uh? Wouldn't it be easier to just say that it's a 7-bit coding system? And what does he mean by "256 possible bytes in an 8-bit computer system"?
I agree, and we're on it. We're only just now allowing more people into the product and it's still a long way from being openly available publicly.

With young companies and products, it's tough to balance all the constraints with the goals. We've spent a lot of time to learn what our users really love about the product. We agree that we need to get a profile out very soon, but we're happy we've put the core of the product first from the beginning.
Building Food Apps: The Importance of a Data Framework
Apple and Android both provide a ton of pre-built, customizable, components for use in apps. I would argue that no one needs to build a Twitter Bootstrap for mobile because Apple and Google have already done so.
He's released the spec for the 16-bit CPU used in the game: http://notch.tumblr.com/post/20056289891/start-classified-tr...
That would be incredibly slow if you wanted to run more than a handful of CPUs...
I'm still confused - why is having ads linking to a competitors site illegal?
IRL Blue's Clues
Since obesity does not matter, who cares what measure you use?

"when we look at objectively measured fitness determined by a maximal exercise test on a treadmill and objectively determined body composition, not self reported height and weight, or not even just body mass index but hydrostatic weighing to estimate percent fat, skin folds, waist circumference, we look at all of those things and the conclusion we come to again and again is that it is low fitness that is a much more important predictor of mortality than is body mass index, fat distribution, overall percent body fat."

"In our analyses over and over again fitness wipes out the hazard associated with obesity."

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/healthreport/he...
So true, I played WoW for about a month when it came out then I thought: "Didn't I get into to programming because I didn't want to work at UPS delivering packages?"

It should have been called World of Errands.
Jae is awesome, but picked a particularly difficult case.

There are certain kinds of diagnosis which are hard for humans and easy for computers, relatively, and some which are hard for computers and easy for people. (well, more likely hard for one and impossible for the other).

Truly novel things, where you aggregate data across multiple sites, are IMO the most amazing. Or, really rare but well defined conditions; doctors, especially busy ones, have a much smaller in-memory working set than computers.

I am very excited by machine diagnosis to augment humans. I don't think it will replace humans for a long time, but making humans even 1% better saves many lives and improves quality of life (and saves money).
I think (d) is the compelling answer. I'm not sure I think that (a-c) are really all that unique to cloud environments. The same can be said for a lot of niche and/or legacy environments dominated by one or two firms.

The side channel prediction is really interesting.(1) Do you think that capability will become widely dispersed or only the realm of the Advanced Persistent Attacker (or whatever the buzznym is)?

(1) Not to imply that the C2 prediction is boring/lacking merit.
Techstars created a reality show out of their program and I think it was widely regarded as a pretty bad decision in hindsight...
You sir, are the best hybrid of geek and reddit. Have an upboat.

Shame the name is trademarked.
Not getting picked should not necessarily reflect poorly on you... But if you try much harder you will just show that they were correct to avoid you. You do have spirit though, so do something useful with it instead of ranting about not being picked at the dance.
How to Find a Growth Hacker for Your Startup - Growth Hacks for Startups
>Part of knowing how to write is knowing when and how to bend or break those principles.

Definitely. I even think that verbosity is a completely acceptable choice given the right context and purpose.
http://b.qr.ae/Hktlyv

This explains our dilemma. Frankly, we are a bunch of "nobodies" in the middle of Iowa. We don't know any Y Combinator Alums, and even if we were to reach out the best we could hope for is a lukewarm they seemed "nice". We have a lot of drive and are trying to prove ourselves any way possible. That's what we're trying to do with this post.
Very insightful, that's my case I believe. I had never used Drupal prior to starting at the place I am now, and part of every project so far has been finding out that Drupal does not, in fact, do what I want. Luckily my boss is a good guy, so he's understanding when I don't estimate correctly.
Maybe he accidentally gave them money twice:

http://cal-access.sos.ca.gov/Campaign/Committees/Detail.aspx...

http://puu.sh/nOlT
Fisker Debuts Atlantic Electric Car After Securing $392 Million in Funding
Seems like this a popular idea lately! People striving for simplicity can only be a good thing. Also check out https://github.com/j2labs/quickness (from the guy who made the equally interesting brubeck python framework).
I agree completely but I think there are two things that make software slightly unique from any piece of art:

1. We have a cultural context that tells us how hard it is to produce something like a song, or a painting. There's a reverence for it. And so people tend to back off of their estimations for the amount of time required to produce it.

2. Software isn't physical. You can hold a big book in your hand say CRAP! that must have taken a long time to do. But you're just looking at the result of a program, if it's done well, it's a tiny streamlined user interface. The result of one button click could have taken thousands of programming hours and thousands of lines of code but you would never know it. Software obfuscates complexity from the user in a way that someone looking at a huge huge painting or a big book doesn't run in to as much.

So if we're talking about the efficiency of natural heuristics in estimating things, I think software is still slightly more difficult to estimate than art. But I agree with your overall point.
"Ok, so this is a system for deploying an appliance type setup on your server possibly comprised of several packages?"

For your use case, not really. Installing software on server is a job for configuration management (e.g. puppet, chef). What juju seems to be about is managing the relationships between services, or service orchestration.

http://askubuntu.com/questions/52840/differentiator-between-...
Ask HN: How to handle a cofounder problem
Need some advice and options here from the HN community on what to do in this difficult situation. We are a year old startup that was founded by 2 technical and 1 non-technical founder. We all have an equal amount of shares (non-vesting). The technical founders (myself and one other) brought in a non-technical founder for sales/marketing, he seem liked a perfect fit: previous successes, hardworking, smart (Ivy League) and a big rolodex. Unfortunately about 6 months into the startup, his story started to unravel. He had no contacts (he passed off people he met in passing or from LinkedIn as really good friends), talks a lot without a lot of substance, he is arrogant, the previous successes were exaggerated and worse than that he stopped doing any real work. We've discussed the situation several times and get a polite brush-off.

Despite all this, we've managed to raise an angel round, hire some employees and about to launch our product. The other cofounder and I would like to remove the non-technical founder from the company.. we could ask him to leave. The problem that we are having is the non-technical founder has a huge percentage of founder shares. Our new employees deserve the stock far more than this clod does. Is there any way to claw them back and redistribute them to new or current employees? We could dilute him out, but I don't think the angel investors would approve. How does HN think we should deal with this situation? What options do we have?
One of the big fundamental differences between MySQL and Postgres is that MySQL has "real" primary keys (the table is sorted by primary key), and Postgres primary keys are just an index with constraints. Neither solution is really better, but for some workloads MySQL will have an advantage here.
every year you don't go to school makes it much harder to go back. if you don't have a degree and varied training - and the demonstrated ability to learn - you'll get harder to employ as time goes on.

sounds like a great opportunity, but i encourage you to think long term. you've just been validated, in part, but i worry that the kind of work you're doing will be equivalent to a factory job in a couple of decades, and you'll be in a similar position for job prospects.
Another thing which I think kills accuracy in estimating development time is the ratio of time needed for "figuring out what to do" and "actually doing it".

If you're learning a song, the first stage is very quick. You think about the problem for a moment and you decide on a plan like "Read the sheet music and try to play the song. Focus on areas you have trouble with. Repeat". The bulk of the time taken is spent "actually doing it", not "figuring out what to do".

The thing about the "figuring out what to do" stage is that often in order to estimate the time needed for that stage, you basically have to have already completed it. The answer could come to you out of the blue, it could take weeks of thinking into dead ends. And with software, that first stage can be the bulk of the time. Software is a more like writing a novel than learning a song. The thing that takes longest isn't the actual writing, it's the figuring out what to write. If someone asked you how long it would take you to write a novel that gives insight into the human condition by following the story of a family caught up in a bloody civil war, what time estimate would you give them? I expect your typing WPM wouldn't be a big part of the calculation.

You only know how long it's going to take once you know how you're going to do it, and once you know how you're going to do it, you've already done most of the hard work.
Asking strangers to spam endorsements about a site that doesn't exist sounds like a foolproof plan.
Same fallacy that convinces people to think they can change the world as young whippersnappers.

I'm sure it'll only take you one life time to change the world.

How you do guess at something without knowing the full size, weight, depth, and complexity of something?
What legitimate reason can there be to deny homosexual people the same liberty that heterosexual people enjoy?

I've never understood how people can be ok with denying liberty to some class of folks. Don't folks realize that there could come a time when they themselves will be in the minority on something? And that they could have their liberty restricted?

We're not talking about forcing the catholic church to marry gay couples. They have the right of free association as far as I understand it and freedom of religion. We are talking about legal marriages. Yes, the "M" word.

Liberty is a basic right.
If your software matters, you will get your priorities in order.
About half the bugs I find in commercial compilers get blamed on the EDG frontend.
If Python Had Lambdas...
How is offering to help someone who asked for help disrespectful? And when did using an ellipsis become disrespectful?
And then some people just use no-nonsense packaging systems.
Like ArchLinux's pacman.

I bet you can write a PKGBUILD for, lets say, zookeeper, including the config you want faster than it takes to deploy juju (which will use the configs it wants)
That's at least arguing about whether or not the tech industry has a widespread issue. This is singling out one guy (whose best-known work already had a mixed reputation among nerds). Even if it turns out Mozilla really is being run by a reactionary religious zealot, it doesn't seem to affect their technical direction nor the use of their donated funds.
I've also done that several times; it really depends on the funder. In a surprising number of cases, the funder has wound up with a pile of money and not enough contacts with relevant people, so they really do choose people out of the applicant pool. It can also vary by country. In Europe, for example, how much relationships matter seems to vary north-to-south. In southern Europe it is pretty much 100% about relationships.

Perhaps in reaction to what's perceived as southern-European corruption, in Scandinavia there is substantial pressure on funders to make their decisions based on the official application process. There's a worry that "contacts" means your old grad-school buddy, someone you know from a sports club or weekly board-game get-together, etc., as opposed to scientific merit. There's also (what seems to me, as a foreigner) a strong worry that the process shouldn't be perceived as a sham, which means that at least some proportion of the funds have to be doled out according to the official application route, to prove to everyone that the system works like it says it does. In practice that ethos is upheld at some places more than others, of course, but in some circumstances you really can just apply and get money.
I've heard "Don't use adjectives" but not qualified in that way, which makes more sense.

"Show, don't tell" without any adjectives can only be pure narration of events and metaphor. Maybe that is good. But it can take more words to say the same thing, and it's difficult. A good exercise though.
> What's changed in the last decade?

The nature of the problems we are trying to solve, and the hardware we are solving them on.

> But yeah in general the C interop is very simple in most languages.

You're not taking into account the fact that the C code cannot be allowed to block the main loop of the program; as is true in any event driven system. Yea, other programming languages might not have to deal with concurrency issues, either by ignoring threading, giving up on an asynchronous system, or giving up on C interop; none of which seem like a worthwhile sacrifice. What is your problem with this implementation technique? It's performant in practice, and its not in your face when actually writing code. This is not complexity you have to worry about. It happens "behind the scenes" as it were.

Go might be challenging to search for, but you're not writing search queries, you're writing posts about programming. It's pretty unambiguous as far as I'm concerned.

And fyi, I've never downvoted you. I think with the increasingly desperate tone in your writing, its not hard for people to realize that you're just hating on Go, and at least the responses to your misinformation are educational, and often interesting.
NaCL support existed for a while, but NaCl kept changing and breaking backwards compatibility, so the Go team decided to drop it until it had stabilized, I think now they are mostly waiting for PNaCl as that seems to be what has most future.
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A La Carte Education
> It is the sort of thing that can be a pain if you don't know it, but can be learned quite easily

I agree, it's not terribly hard to pick up the basic idea, but it still doesn't lend itself to the idea of being 'self-documenting', which has always been a helpful fallback when dealing with python stuff that I encounter problems with. I guess it kinda just feels like it encourages too shallow of an understanding of what's going on, especially if for some reason I might want to tweak/customize certain things later on; it feels more geared towards giving you a fish, as opposed to teaching you how to fish (which is highlighted by the 'standard' encouragement to use lots of code generation). Even after going through the docs, it took me way too long to get even a vague idea of how to properly set up a custom model/migration without the rails generator tool. But I'll admit, that's all a lot more in the realm of personal preference.

Bundler is cool, but even with strict versioning, setting things up for the first time is no walk in the park. I won't blame rails for that though, that's clearly more of an ecosystem problem. A bigger problem than versioning though (in my eyes anyway), is when plugins follow this 'rails-way' of doing things magically, and leave no clear way to troubleshoot problems when they arise (devise, I'm looking at you).

I too find the rails guides and rails tutorial to be immensely helpful, but it's more because I would literally be completely lost without referring to them every 5mins, than because I find them terribly insightful. I know the django docs aren't really that much better, but since I can usually work my way around a django project without referring them as frequently, I guess my standards for them is lower? Same could be said for a lot of their plugins, because again, at least there I have been able to fall back on 'self-documenting code' most of the time.

I do think rails is pretty cool, and I could see why it got the praise it did, but I would probably only use it on small projects that involved only a handful of people from the get-go, because I would feel bad dropping a newbie onto a mountain of legacy rails code.