skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my opinion it's HUGELY important.

My thoughts; sexy =

1.) Free press, lots of it, results in free traffic and traction SO increased chance of success. As an investor, getting behind an 'animal' capable of producing either viral growth or free press (helping reach users) delivers a product with free marketing built in and that is a huge overhead ticked off with growth potential beyond most ideas.

2.) Investment is easier to raise, you get more of it, faster, at a better deal and from better investors SO increased chance of success.

3.) 'Sexy' tends to attract A Class employee's, who in turn attract and build an A Class company with the potential to execute the idea or pivot SO increased chance of success.

4.) Directly related to No. 3 is the increased retention of staff. Again, hiring, knowledge and skill loss, downtime, etc can kill a startup so this is a huge advantage.

5.) Company moral - It's a lot more fun to work long hours on an idea that could change the world. It is more rewarding and so going the extra mile, maybe even for a lower wage, can result. Maintaining company focus and moral is vital to success.

6.) Finally, Users. If it's sexy it's sticky. If it's 'viral' it can grow fast, become addictive and present users a product they just love.

Sex sells. Really, a better question is what defines 'sexy'. It's the job of the founder(s) (entrepreneur) to communicate the vision to the press, investors, potential employee's, current employee's, etc. The skill is in making the idea appear sexy. Many successful companies simply took an existing idea and put a 'sexy' image on it, sold the idea better, resulting in 1-6 and bang, you got a winner.

As for being new, innovative, it's obvious that's important. And as for Crazy, well, what's sane about any startup?
For an orthogonal perspective, see grellas (writing on another article):

Work-life balance is very important as well, a point the author emphasizes. He seems to have made that choice later in life (as did I) and I commend him for it. But, while I can exhort others too to strive for such balance, I will not begrudge them the choice to work exceedingly hard (especially as they are first developing in their careers) to achieve other "unbalanced" goals. People do accomplish insanely great things by working insanely hard. If they choose to do this in their work as employees, that is their privilege and, as long as they are highly-skilled and highly compensated, I say more power to them if they do it without the benefit of protective labor laws.

Complete comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3642433.
Came here for this info. Thanks, and may the force be with you (and also with you).
I think it would be better for industry not to pass a bill at all than to pass one that introduced judicial oversight and explicit liability for information sharing that is already occurring.

I think it doesn't make much sense to introduce sweeping, meaningful privacy controls in the context of a bill that aims to help organizations coordinate defenses against nation-state attackers. The net effect would simply be to hamstring defenders. This bill is an attempt to increase sharing.

(I don't think we need CISPA at all and don't support it).

I think it makes a lot of sense to introduce sweeping new privacy controls in general. The ECPA predates the public Internet and could use a thorough update.
Reading old articles about the YC application process, it always seems like the teams accepted were emailing/skyping/etc with yc partners throughout the process.

Is it indicative of a rejection if you haven't had any correspondence with YC since submitting the app? I'm hoping not because nowadays there are just so many more apps.
Semicolons - now get the tshirts :)
Create Instant Floor Plans Using Your iPhone Or iPad’s Camera
OK, I won't mention the big London event to anyone. If people are talking about it, I'll mention that I have no interest and walk away.
I think that Microsoft will probably end up buying Nokia outright at some point if this slide continues, especially if Google gets serious about making it's own hardware via it's Motorola Mobility acquisition.
These are implementation-specific extensions, not part of Scheme. Scheme doesn't have e.g. a GUI either (neither does CL) notwithstanding that specific Scheme and CL implementations have GUIs. It's borderline trivial to add reader macros to any implementation of any dialect of Lisp, but only in CL can you count on having them available.
Yep, I think we agree. ECPA2012 sounds like a great goal.
Why the FCC Fined Google Just 68 Seconds in Profits
Respecting "the Zone"
As Rails and Django become more complex, it's making more and more sense to give .NET and Java stacks a second look.
It's not only that you need to explain your reasoning...it's also that you operate in a vacuum. The constraints of actual designers are rarely "you get a shittily designed page, do WHATEVER you want with it." (Not saying the current YC pages are shittily designed, in fact while some of them are not aesthetically pleasing they all look reasonably well thought out).

I think all OP is saying is "beware, you're only getting the aesthetic practice, and in design it turns out thats really a very minor part of what's important."
The General Things make_sandwich RubyGem
It interests me as yet another example of why DWIM in programming languages is a bad idea.

Maybe the next time a language designer contemplates including such a feature as ASI, he/she will remember this furore and reconsider.
It makes me wonder how Snoop must feel, having performed that same song many times with Pac before...
So you have 5-6 hours of commute time? This is insane. I had 2 hours of commute time and it drove me nuts.
There's a whole fascinating book about the evolution of this illusion. http://www.amazon.com/Hiding-Elephant-Magicians-Impossible-D...
I've recommended Metricfire to a few clients now for statistics collation for their apps. Where I used to cringe at the impending questions about loading/processing/UI response overhead for error logging and that kinda stuff, I'm loving that a product has practically all of the answers!
I've recently noticed a lot of self-published books on Amazon that just pull their text straight from Wikipedia articles, like this (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Articles-Nintendo-Including-Pictocha...) or this (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Articles-Nintendo-Including-Pictocha...). Most of them have little disclaimers that presumably get them past Amazon's rules but they're still cluttering up a lot of search results and doubtless tricking a few people.
Exact same thing could be said about startups. But it's OK for us to want to make millions in one hit because we're better than everyone else.
But I'm assuming you're safe when the item "Ships from and sold by Amazon.com."
There are people who think those of certain races and genders typically act in a certain way too.
"jewellery" is a chiefly, but not strictly, british spelling.
Sometimes it's not even the employer, it's the employees who see working extra hours as a badge of honor. Everyone stays longer than they need to so if you decide you want a work-life balance, you are the odd one out and made to feel guilty.
Friendships helps two people figure out if they can stand each other in the long run.

You say you will ask [someone] to leave no matter how many years you've known each other, but you're missing the point. The goal is to not let any of your team leave the startup. That's how startups fail.

That's why you need to have built a pre-existing relationship. Sure, there's still a chance your co-founder (who's your friend) just won't mesh with you, but it's much less likely than if you just start working with a complete stranger.
How the Best Businesses Keep Innovation Alive
For what I just mentioned. Taste encompasses more than just design. Wikipedia actually describes it pretty well in my opinion: "Taste as an aesthetic, sociological, economic and anthropological concept refers to a cultural patterns of choice and preference." I would say design only really addresses aesthetic. Tomato tomahto maybe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taste_(sociology)
Horse radish is hardly tasteless. Is this a colloquialism I'm unaware of?
Has anyone ready my new book, Whore and Piece?
Just chill. We were selected for YC interview last year and we talked/emailed/skyped with partners only when we were selected for interview. I believe teams start talking with partners only when they are accepted for interview.
No, lets face it, it is sub-optimal for anyone. I'll be leaving soon anyway. I couldn't keep that up indefinitely.

Although, weirdly, there are those in there who do even further commutes.
6 Ways To Run Windows On An iPad
Is There a Y Combinator Valuation Bubble or Not?
I think it's tied to the industry you work in more so than geography.

For example, game companies can lack work/life balance, even in Europe.
I dont think so. Both are delivered at the same time.
I work in a Microsoft shop in a 6 person team of C# programmers. We follow the language closely, try to compete with each other keeping up with new language features (among other things!), and take whatever benefits we can from new stuff. When generics appeared in 2.0 it transformed our coding style. When LINQ (the language feature, not the LINQ to SQL ORM) was added it was transformed again. There hasn't been a major paradigm shift since but we've found handy places to use optional parameters, type covariance and contravariance, tried to handle the new dynamic keyword like dynamite, and we've definitely got plans for the new async features coming out in C# 4. I can tell you from attending technical conferences that we are not an atypical bunch.

So to answer your question, the odds are very good! :)
Just some quick numbers - in 1 week flat I've been able to create a working prototype for our start-up with the stack mentioned, coding in my spare time (after work and on the weekend). If you know your stuff you can get up and running in no time :)
Our start-up (collectifly.com) is built exclusively on the .NET stack, with ASP.NET MVC as frontend and using a bunch of open source libraries like Twitter Bootstrap, jQuery, KnockoutJS and a few more. For the backend I'm currently experimenting with RavenDB not because I don't like SQL Server but because we're building a social graph, so a NOSQL database seems to fit better.
Why should any credence be given to Moody's when they were the same group of people who were rating subprime mortgages as AAA. In my mind, they lost their credibility as a ratings agency.
Pure Evil
Could be better, could be worse. The implementation definitely needs a bit of love, yet I think this project could turn out to be rather useful. I guess I see it not as a low-level Lisp, but as a Lispy high-level assembly. Applying Lisp macros to assembly generation seems like a pretty natural thing, similar to Forth in a way. Instead of trying to make high-level stuff efficient, just make low-level stuff easy.
You're absolutely right. I was in the audience last night and was unable to 100% distinguish with my own eyes that the performer on stage was not real. I think a lot of people are just watching the re-hash of the high-definition feed with closeups, where you can see some of the pixelation and movement/animation aliasing. However at 400+ft and non-direct lighting, the effect was nothing short of creepy.
Yeah, the balance aspect is pretty key on both sides. I generally put in 7-8 hours in the office, plus perhaps an hour or so in the morning before the rest of my family is awake (though I may not always work this hour). I've been with the same employer for over five years, and there have been times that I've been asked to work a bit extra (though, typically, I've been able to leave at 5, and work later in the evening, after the kids are in bed). And, of course, there have been times I've been given a great deal of flexibility in my work schedule to accommodate emergencies.

Of course, this isn't typical, perhaps even in tech, and I feel rather fortunate to have this situation.
This is a popular sentiment among designers, but it is equally dangerous. The flash, sizzle, and aesthetics are a HUGE part of design. People make judgements in fractions of seconds, well before they have a chance to experience interactions or any of the deeper level design issues.

I've seen three of these redo's on HackerNews and each time the redesign is aesthetically much nicer. Sure there are some things that could be better if he understood the market or product context at a deeper level, but each service looked more professional/desirable.

I manage a team of designers and these would be great deliverables if the goal was to help establish a style guide for a brand. After this round, I would have a PM and a marketer work with the designer to optimize flow/content, but this is exactly what I'd expect from a visual designer.
You've never seen a VB.NET vs. C# argument? Call yourself lucky.
I'm pretty sure you can build a startup around almost any mature, real-world tech stack... so, basically, exclude "esoteric" programming languages like Brainfuck, Intercal, Whitespace, etc. Otherwise, I think you could - if you chose to - build a startup around RPG/400 on an IBM iSeries, Fortran, COBOL on MVS on an IBM zSeries, Ada, .Net, Prolog, Pascal, Perl or whatever floats your boat. It's a question of the tradeoffs and the economics of each decision. Can you hire programmers? What are the licensing costs? What about the "ilities," like scalability, interoperability, reliability, etc?

Maybe for some startups the right decision is .Net, or RPG, or Forth or Rexx or what-have-you. But I'm guessing for most startups, there are better choices. I'm also not sure that - even on a per startup basis - there is one ultimately right choice. More likely there are a handful of really good choices, a pile of so-so choices, and a long-tail of fairly ridiculous choices.
The music made me feel like I was watching a modern Fantasia. Fascinating stuff - although, as people here say, what matters is what it's used for.
It is absolutely batshit fucking crazy. And I don't even like the work.

Partly my own fault because I chose several years ago to live in quite a rural area. Still, not worth the hassle.
Mechanical CPU Clock
"You are only locked into FPS if that's only what you're capable of making."

It seems clear to me that I implied that being only capable of making an FPS means you are locked into making an FPS.
I'm actually making a prediction, and not a judgement. Nobody would say I'm a member of the Lisp community, whatever that might mean. But I have seen people get landed on pretty viciously for this kind of formatting before, and if you want participation from a community you should abide the community's standards, even if they are irrational.

Even if the point is to write Algolish code, formatting it like this is likely to earn scorn rather than appreciation.
Taste is subjective and fleeting. The once lauded tastes of the 90s are now regarded as oh so dreadfully pedestrian by enlightened contemporary minds.

The crux of taste is rooted in celebrity worship and group think. Taste is a roll of the die and a hope that your vision resonates with those around you. It's no coincidence that every great artist is eventually regarded as jumping the shark; their tastes evolve or remain static, but time tends to displace the alignment between one's taste and the world around them (hence the need to "stay on top" of the latest trends).

Taste is almost negligible.
Adam Roberts has a few parody books (eg "The Soddit"). He also has some good science fiction books. I particularly enjoyed Salt, and New Model Army.
Please stop browsing HN so we can have this game sooner.

Love,
The Internet
And what about UDK, which is similar engine but with more widespread adoption?
You are only a couch and some beer away from being the next Diggnation :P Seriously though, have you thought about instead of having a few guests talking about stories, make it open mic so everyone listening to the show could also participate, open mic style? That could be fun.

I'm also writing a tool that helps podcasters organize sound clips and coordinate broadcasting with multiple guests: https://github.com/jiakeliu/Cobra
Please excuse the svn to git transfer mess, but maybe this tool would come in handy one day.

Best of luck!
How to Build a Web Following
If you ask this question then the answer is no, however, you probably can't build a startup in any language as you're too worried about what everyone else is doing rather than what your customers want.

Seriously think about a young mark zuckerberg making facemash and worrying whether it could be a $100 billion dollar company if he wrote it in PHP.

If anyone worries about these things just change your server headers so it looks like you're developing in whatever language they want.

Its usually a good idea to change the headers anyway so that any automated attacks run the wrong scripts. Change your postfix to Exchange, change your nginx to IIS and vice versa.
You mean like this?

http://www.gizmag.com/bumpfree-dynamic-speedbump-gives-you-a...
There are some interesting painting remix projects, by the way: http://www.studiovoltaire.org/edition-arcangel.htm
I had a point early in my career where I accepted a 5 hour daily commute (round trip) in order to accomplish the more important goal of finding meaningful work in my field in the region I wanted to live in. Definitely sub-optimal, locally, but things worked out for the best in the end. I _did_ gain 25 lbs or so in 10 months of doing this. Luckily, it sounds like the poster is only doing this temporarily.
How Hologram Tupac Cemented Music as the Technology Early Adopter
Ah, but that's our point I think. You mean to talk about design, but taste is not synonymous with design. If you mean to say that the SW screen wipes are terrible design even if they're properly implemented, I think you'd have less people squawking. But you said they were bad taste, which is subjectively incorrect because they are in keeping with the older films.
Even thirty more examples would not neccessarily mean Rubyists are "often" like this. There are tens of thousands of them.

If ruby-talk, #ruby-lang, ruby-core, and Ruby conference talks were typically littered with swearing, there'd be a point. As it is, it's a generalisation formed off the back of a handful of cases. Stereotyping, if you will.

I've been covering the news in the Ruby world for about 6 years now, almost full time. People are inventing these silly stereotypes as a way to discredit the language and it's users, it's not based in reality.
Cybercrime Estimates Are Wildly, Ridiculously Overblown
In the first few seconds of viewing the facelift vs the original, I preferred the facelift in each case. There are plenty of folks who do judge a book by its cover. "Will first time visitors think our company/product/service is legitimate?" is a valid design problem, and I think the facelifts likely improve that important first impression.
I have 2 hours of commute and I'm battling mental instability. I have to keep a queue of audiobooks handy, because two weeks with traffic and nothing to uplift me is enough to drive (haha) me into a bad mood by the time I'm home. I'm also a more aggressive driver when I'm not listening to something worth-while. The worst part is, last job, I had the same time commute, but could code on the train. Night and day.
Every programmer should have had a professor who was really, inordinately fond of Ada, so much so that at least one assignment required coding in, or basic knowledge of, the language.

Ada is strict as balls, but unlike its wannabe-successor, C++, its strictness is for the sake of clairty and the compiler usually actively helps you bring your code into compliance. (Rather than, say, complaining randomly because the syntax for template instantiations changed this week, or punishing you for pronouncing the word "const" with the improper intonation.)

With a bit of exposure to Ada, programmers might understand better why languages are so finicky about syntax details, and that just because a language is lenient, doesn't mean you should take advantage of that leniency. And that, in cases like JavaScript with its bloody semicolons, perhaps leniency is a disadvantage.
That is a good idea. I'll listen to that podcast.
Thanks! I'd chill, but I've decided to base my entire self-worth on this.
I've worked those longer hours on one startup, 10-11 hour days for several weeks putting out fires. Never once did I get paid more or even a congrats for the work. It was expected and quite frankly, I enjoyed it as a new hire. It helped me get up to speed, built up some comradeship with the other devs/mgrs there, and I had nothing better to do at home. But as the fires died down and I became well-known for my work ethic, WHEN IT WAS NEEDED, I pulled back to 8 hour days on average. So as in many things in life, it's ok in moderation to work longer hours, but I try not to make a habit of it.

Nowadays, I'm at a large enterprisey business and I may work 7 hours during off times. But there was a point (oddly enough right when I started) where I was putting in 10 hour days for a couple weeks. Now that I have kids, I really do want to get home before they go to bed. Also helps that I have a 7 minute commute.
This seems to address the use case of wanting more storage for a given amount of memory, but not the reverse. You can't, say, get 16gigs of ram, without also getting a 620gig disk, nor can you control core count independently of the other variables, in contrast to (for example) EC2, where there are a variety of instance types with different tradeoffs in CPU and memory, and storage is effectively always added (and billed) separately. It's unfortunate that Rackspace isn't taking advantage of the opportunity this relaunch presents to increase the flexibility of their product.
Cloning dropbox at this point would not compel me to switch. I think Google is smarter than that. I'm looking forward to their announcement.
When does the W12 App go up? If we're not chosen this time, we plan to be the first in line for W12 :)
Sprawl Recovery - A 12-Step Program
That's a good point. But the end result should be "lots of great games". And I can't find them.

This paragraph best sums it up:

“Watch this—it never fails,” he said, bending over his computer keyboard. On one of his twin monitors, Hecker pulled up the movie-trailers section of Apple.com; on the other, he loaded the upcoming-releases page of GameSpot.com. The movies, Hecker pointed out, encompassed a huge diversity of topics and approaches, from buddy comedies to period dramas to esoteric art films. The video games, on the other hand, were almost all variations on a single theme: outlandishly attired men armed with gigantic weapons, shooting things.

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/the-most...
That's the main assumption that people care about. In contrast, logistic regression (aka maximum entropy) does not make this assumption. As a go-to first classifier I would suggest multi-class logistic regression with regularization.
Is the launch date of next week not new info?
empty array evaluates to true. :)
I'll be glad if the publishing industry chooses DRM-free as their standard. But that's unlikely. And if the standard will be pushed by the editors - or if they adopt Adobe's one - I guess there will be a lot of content...