skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Boo-hoo. Are they going to waste tax money on upgrading to new Macs because they can't figure out the "hard to use" windows machines?
High Readability for your Terminal.app
There's a substantial difference between making an exception to your own self-imposed standard and violating the rule of law.
"Elon Musk has issued an email confessing that it had no idea actual production costs for the $92,000 Roadster would run closer to $140,000."

There will be some interesting times ahead of us. There are many business people like this in the United States today. It is a little endemic to the type of education we receive in my opinion.

Business people here can give you the formula for compound interest off the top of their heads. And tell you how much money they are making on the cash they have in the bank with impressive detail. Yet when you get to the part of due diligence where you ask them about amortization issues on their plan to manufacture a new type of widget, the eyes glaze over and you can hear the song and dance in their reply.

So even though you know it's not the best thing for the country . . . you recommend that they outsource manufacturing.
For what it's worth, you don't see many of those jobs in the midwest either... It's all SOA/six sigma/RUP madness here too.

To top it off, I have to update three timesheets daily.
Even in Test Form, Windows 7 Leaves Vista in the Dust
Off-topic, but I did see a pretty good friend finder linked to on hacker news the other day. Can't remember the name of it though.
I HIGHLY recommend adding a LOT of language to the contract that deals with the exact terms of payment. Some things to consider:

1) What are the late penalties if they don't pay on time?

2) What are the penalties if they (or you) cancel the contract?

3) What happens if you can't meet a milestone or deadline because they didn't give you a deliverable on time? Make sure you aren't held accountable and make EXTRA sure that you'll be paid for the extra time you have to waste in catching up.

4) (If they are not local) Spell out how they send you payments. Priority Mail with Delivery Confirmation is only a few bucks and will avoid any headaches with "We sent the check, we swear"

5) If this is your primary source of income, then Net 30 is NOT good enough. They need to pay Net 15 or better and you should be invoicing every two weeks. Big companies have a real problem with this, but standard monthly invoices and Net 30 will cause you to starve for several months before ever getting a dime.

The BEST way to arrange payments is to spell out the exact date that they will send a payment (and how much). It should be so precise that you don't even need to invoice them because all the info is right there.

6) Specify how long you will wait for a late payment before work stops all together.

In 6 years of contract work, I've NEVER had a contract that successfully avoided all of the situations above. Every one has run into one of these caveats, which are 'conveniently' left out of most boilerplate contracts. If these issues aren't addressed, you will be waiting for money for a LONG time.
Seeing yourself in your child is a most amazing thing, and sometimes a scary thing because you will then see your parents in yourself (maybe for the first time). Take tons and tons of pictures, because they grow very fast -- so fast that time for you will go by faster as you/they get older. Best wishes for a happy and healthy child, Mom, Dad, and family. Helping with schoolwork can be worse than changing diapers. When things are rough the first year, remember: these are the good years!
That's nonsense, web programming is not (at least not in the general case) about forms and reports.

If forms and database queries eat up a large portion of your time then I'd suggest to look into proper frameworks. In fact, that's what web programming is about these days: Find ways to make the common tasks as easy as possible, without sacrifying performance or flexibility.

You don't want to spend the lion's share of your time on creating forms and views. You want to spend it on making the creation of forms and views so easy that the friction for actual feature development approaches zero.
I think with almost every comment here cringing at the terminology, people calling themselves (or others) "rock stars" are in the minority
"Presentationzen" by Garr Reynolds and "Slide:ology" by Nancy Duarte will be exceedingly helpful to you. Here are links to their blogs and Amazon descriptions. Good luck!

http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321525655/103-6148611-3957...

http://blog.duarte.com/

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596522347?ie=UTF8&tag=...

You should also find a copy of Guy Kawasaki's "Reality Check" or "The art of the start". Even if you don't have enough time to push through the whole book, just read the chapter on pitching. Should be very helpful.
This article just reinforced how hard it is to build brilliant products inside traditional software houses. The thought of going through several rewrites of a back end and front end, prior to release, would be laughed at.
No one thinks the above is funny or worthy of upmodding? I think it's hilarious ... but I wrote it.
75% of new open-source software written in C or Java
Being in California would have changed everything for us.
EBook: JavaScript Performance Rocks
Researching Video Games the UX Way
Do you seriously believe that the Web 2.0 kids invented that? Frameworks, code generators, CASE tools, the whole lot have been around for a long time.

If web programming isn't all about validating and storing data (the tag is even called <form>), and retrieving and formatting data (into HTML) then what is it?
Yeah, it was coming. I hope the Obama administration changes NSA from being the cradle of evil to something useful.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=365948 (one of many)

Spy Master http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/01/21/080121fa_fact_...
A worthwhile long read.
Google Docs Design Flaw May Fool You Into Making Your Docs Editable by Anyone
Supply and sourcing are curious animals. I'm reminded of this every time I go to Ikea to buy $30 "Stolmens" to get 14 feet of that beautiful anodized aluminum tube for projects that would cost me more than $100 to buy raw from my local metal place.
As I'm not at a Mac at the moment, could someone post a screenshot of this terminal style?
Twitter's API Limit: Static Control in a Dynamic World
The Revolution Will Be Prosthetized
First, electric companies have no competition in most places.

Second, $0.30/GB of transfer is a pretty reasonable amount. If you have a dedicated server you can get down to around $0.10/GB, but even Amazon charges $0.17/GB and that isn't expensive. And your home isn't a data center.

Storage and bandwidth have nothing to do with each other.
I have a strange problem on Leopard that I didn't have on Tiger where I lose all my ctrl+ commands. I can't ctrl+l to clear the screen, I can't ctrl+a to go to the beginning of the line, etc.

I use iTerm normally but have confirmed this problem with Terminal.app also. Has anybody else run into this? Very frustrating.
Rands in Repose: Free Electrons
Well, unfortunately the population of dog-loving barefeet coders does not entirely overlap with the population of rockstar programmers. But nonetheless our main criterions remain quality of code and ability to communicate in a meaningful way (asynchronously if their sleep-cycle requires it).

If someone can deliver both of that then, frankly, he may run around naked all day as far as I am concerned. I have no reason to discriminate dog-loving nudists, as long as that doesn't negatively affect their contribution to our business objectives.
Better buses through psychology
I agree with your last statement; I've loved stories since I was tiny and I don't mean I found them entertaining, I mean I'd just be playing and I'd make up a whole story, my friend and I spent the better part of our pre-teen years playing games in a completely made up world and not 'cowboys and indians' or 'cops and robbers' like everyone else did.

Yet when I got into high school they really tried hammering in Essays to the point where no one knew how to write a real story. You'd get people screwing up, bunching 5 lines of different characters speech into 1 paragraph because it was dealing with one point. People didn't seem to understand that in a piece of creative writing you don't need to have a point to every line as long as every line helps make a point.

I'm working on a novel right now, which coincidentally illustrates this point. My chapters are actually titled as the point of the entire chapter at the moment, here are a few: Casual Subterfuge, The Truth Unveiled and The Advent of (important character). The chapter titles will possibly change, but right now they're as useful as any writing plan I could make because if it isn't setting up later plots and it isn't advancing the plot arc of the chapter, then it gets ripped out.

The biggest thing I noticed in novels when in school was that some people butchered it with a preface. Most SF/F/H writers it's sometimes just a page saying thank you (normally to their spouse, agent and publisher - in that order) however a significant amount do this in the afterword. Yet when I picked up books I was assigned in school the preface took 5 pages describing the purpose of the book and I just thought that was cheap and lazy.
The Cartoon Network's MMO uses one of these specially customized and packaged versions of mono:

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Jan-22.html
I prefer "silly" to "mind-numbingly foolish", but I don't think he does himself any favors by using the term.
Just in time for the new administration, the Washington Post launches Who Runs Gov
Microsoft to Layoff 5,000
7 Business Mistakes
Visualizing Twitter as Barack Obama Became the 44th President
Microsoft slashes 5,000 jobs, misses earnings forecasts
Thank you: the first and second were in my shopping cart already (suggested by some fellow on another site), will add the ones from GK as well
How do you get around? One of the things I love about Boston is the public transportation.
Yes, nice and to the point. Thanks! :)
I think it's great that he's making records public and all, but before we start judging his character and how he's going to govern, let's realize this is only Day 2.

You can't summarize a man by one (extremely highly scrutinized) day of action. In a few years we will be able to summarize the man. I for one hope it's a good summary.
Mine works just fine. What do you use as your terminal settings? (terminal preferences -> advanced -> declare terminal as)

Mine's set to xterm-color, and all the bindings work just fine.
"To top it off, I have to update three timesheets daily"

Ouch!
If you looked for rockstar janitors who mopped floors for fun, you wouldn't find any.

In honor of my late grandmother, who devoted about twenty years' worth of Saturdays to cleaning the floors and bathrooms of her local church -- for free -- I must inform you that this isn't true.

Whether or not she was maximally productive is quite a different question. A lot of ritual activity isn't especially intended to be productive.
Who will be masters of the ever-expanding 'Twitterverse'?
Head-slap "of course"

Thanks for taking the time Ezra.
Congratulations!

On the humorous side, this reminds me of this story: http://edward.oconnor.cx/2005/04/rms

(Richard Stallman speaks a bit about having children)

The funniest part is:

"It doesn’t take special talents to reproduce,
even plants can do it. On the other hand, contributing
to a program like Emacs takes real skill. That is really
something to be proud of.

It helps more people, too."

One more link that made me laugh a lot (again, Stallman):
http://www.art.net/Studios/Hackers/Hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-d...
ACard's ANS-9010 Serial ATA RAM disk: Solid-state storage from another angle
> Plus it seemed like the thermometer was pinned at 72 degrees every day.

You say that like it's a bad thing.
Congrats

Here in Kenya, the kids born around now are either Obama (boy or Michelle (girl)
EBay sales down
Sorry but you are wrong. Twitter is Capitalism on the internet. It lets anyone compete and assumes the market will auto-regulate. Which is absolutely right. Although they let anyone use their API without much control, they know that if your app sucks, the market will not follow.
Personally I'd say put the book down and just do it, but then I've been writing since I was 15.

My best advice would be to read a really good novel while you're writing, because there's something about seeing a novel unfold whilst you're writing one that seems to help the process along. You'll likely get through 3-4 books (if you read like me) when writing a novel and this can really help in the beginning because you see something started in the beginning really unfold at the end and it's like 'holy crap, thats the best thing in the entire book', then you have a moment thinking 'well why the fuck aren't I doing something like that!', then you do.

The other advantage in reading while you write is that I think it reassures you when you get blocked, because 99% of the time you'll think the story is going too slowly, however that's because it takes like 10-100 times longer to write something creative than it does to read it. I think it was Richard Curtis (Notting Hill/Bridget Jones/Love Actually) who made this point; he was asked why there's such a large gap between all his great award winning movies and he said quite simply, 'because it takes a lot of time to write something important to me'. This is quite well illustrated by his writing credits, he switches between writing a blockbuster movie and TV comedy (Mr Bean) with his friend from university.
People are far more discerning in the credit crunch - they're still spending, but not in a spontaneous way. That's what's hitting eBay sales and why some more up market retailers are still doing well.
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3...

"Whenever we express a view of that sort, some readers are bound to protest that we, as a publication based in London, should not be poking our noses in other people's politics. Translated, this invariably means that protesters disagree with our choice. It may also, however, reflect a lack of awareness about our readership."

I don't like The Economist, but you are right, they did the right thing in 2004, Amazingly.
The glorious public transit system and my t(rusty) bike. We're nowhere near Boston in transit...or California for that matter. I practically lived on Cal Train when I lived in Santa Clara. In Florida, you just need to be creative. Zipcar also helps.
LEGO Universe - massively multiplayer world to debut in 2009
Just use SBCL. Problem solved. It's a great implementation with a big following among Lispers.
Organic Semiconductor Breakthrough Could Speed Flexible Circuits
Scotch Whiskey: Off to See the World
Microsoft to cut 5000 workers.
How Porsche made billions
Sad Day For Microsoft: 5,000 Laid Off, Earnings And Revenues Down
Why is the word "fraternity boy" often bearing a derogatory connotation?

I'm part of Sigma Chi, and without it my university experience would not be complete.

Also, Bush was part of "Skull and Bones" which is a secret society, NOT a fraternity. Basically, an invite only club for rich/powerful people.
Battery-backed RAM. Yawn.
Didn't I just explain that in my previous post?

Ultimately all programming is about "garbage in / garbage out" or, as you put it, input, validate, store, output.

Summing up a specific programming domain like that is a bit like saying "architecting a house is about placing walls, doors and windows".

That statement is ofcourse true but it falls short of describing the real challenge which consists of deciding how and where to place said walls and doors under the premise of what we're trying to build (a train station or a shopping mall?).

Similarly, if you're spending more time on writing forms than on the features backing these forms then you're probably doing something wrong.
Google AJAX API Playground
I had for some reasons hoped that MS won't be hit by the downturn. Apparently, the 800-pound gorilla of software industry isn't immune either.
Ask.com Acquires Sendori
Anyone can have kids, but to raise them well is a hell of a lot of work.
Congrats :) Kids are just awesome...
Oh yeah, no disputing that, I do it myself :)
Write a grant proposal.
Trying to lump all of programming into the types of things you have worked on is a narrow view of the field. Programmers produce everything from high art, to plumbing but it's much closer to engineering than a musician. While some parts of programming is creative as a profession you get the full range from creative work to simple trial and error.

EX: There are a lot of programmers who spend a lot of time interfacing with buggy API's which is soul sucking work, because the bugs are random.

PS: If you are building a boy band you probably don't are about artistic talent. It might be useful but it's far from the most important trait.
All It's Cracked Up To Be
Screenshot, with Consolas replaced by Inconsolata:
http://baldessin.fr/2009/giovanistyle-20090122-154740.png
Congratulations Paul! I wish you and your wife all the best during and after the pregnancy. - Eiso
Visualizing the commit history of Python
Pros know how to use both. Six years old = Windows 2003 server, or XP.

Now if they really wanted to impress me, they would have installed Debian on all of them!
Beware the second-system effect. You know, the one where a parent says "It's too bad that I never got to go to medical school -- but my kid is going to be a doctor!"

Fortunately, startup-trained parents generally expect their kids to change their business plans several times.

(P.S. -- congratulations!)
I'm in Beverly and would love to know more about nearby hackers. Can you fill out your news.yc profile?
Hacking a Programmable Road Sign
The actual washington post article is quite different from this blog post. Yes the title on the blog post is catchy - but it's also not accurate.
Sometimes the Old Ways Are Best [pdf]
There are a lot of great tools for building simple forms that talk to databases and generate reports. At some point when it comes down to the things that separate this from from all other forms already created someone needs to actually build the form. It's a boring few minutes and then it's done, but then they want to change something and someone needs to fix that. And so it goes.
OK, So hypothetically...

1. I wait until there are some clear Twitter client winners. I'd expect the market will diverge on a Killer Twitter client for each platform. Perhaps there's some alternate web interfaces with killer features, such that people stop using twitter.com.

2. I buy those twitter clients. I now control maybe 80% of the twitter client world.

3. I stop using twitter.com API as the backend, and replace it with my own.

4. Twitter.com becomes pretty much moot.

Maybe it's far fetched, maybe it's not...

Alternatively,

1. Wait until 3rd party twitter clients account for a large amount of twitter traffic - say 80%.

2. Do a deal between all the 3rd party twitter clients to stop using twitter, and collaborate on an alternate backend.
Paul, what are your thoughts on Joel's essay on writing specs?: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000036.html
Has it grown to where some people come just to socialize, not to play poker?
we re-wrote the frontend about six times and the backend three times by launch

The more I work in this field, the more I think that this is the best and quickest way to build good software.

Once you realize that everything you write is disposable, you have freed yourself to just write and judge later.

It's not how fast you get started, it's how fast you finish. Sometimes the long roads around is quicker.
I think the point is that the construction workers don't get to decide where the doors and windows go. In most cases, programmers aren't the architects.
I really hope Windows 7 turns out to be a decent operating system. I'm a Mac guy, but I feel that that's out of default right now: there's nothing else that's as polished or capable. I'd like it to be a real competition.
Not very impressive. I'll take the "Pro" theme with size 13 font any day over this.
Yea, silly works.

If we really want to give programmers silly names fine I am a "Professional". Aka the movie "the Professional" where you have a problem, you pay me money, I solve the problem. Rock Stars are just another silly name people give out so they don't have to pay you what your time is worth. Look up actual rock stars they tend to end up broke because while it might look like the are making a lot of money most of the time they are getting peanuts.
They're considered munitions by government employees, because of the encryption keys they're loaded with. Government employees have to 'check them in' and out like their service weapon, and aside from the encryption, don't really do anything special.

Oh, and they sell for something like $10,000.
I worked with a core group of people that were responsible for IT in the Executive Office of the President under Bush II, but left in the wake of the missing email scandal. They were some of the most extremely bureaucratic IT people I've ever met. They all were incredibly hard workers, but fundamentally in the box thinkers. The way they implemented Microsoft security could be classified as insane. Locking down stuff to the point where it just wouldn't work any more. Forget being an admin as a developer, you had to ask for temporary permission to launch a service on your server. They had incredibly cozy relationships with the Microsoft sales team, and many ended up working for Microsoft after they left.
I'm in Huron village, and it's about as suburbia as I can stand. But, hey, to each his own.

Not to worry about Boston, there's actually an interesting announcement that will help fill the YC gap that is coming in the next 60 days.
Congratulations! Wish you the best.
Don't call my country a cunt, and don't call my fraternity a frat. "Frat" is generally derogatory when used by outsiders. It's analogous to "nigger" being used by non-blacks.
You should apt-get install probabilistic-parser. (do probabilistic parsers exist by the way?)
You missed the point. A skilled, creative programmer will write their own utility or framework to generate the boring stuff. Assuming they've done that well, feeding the form specification to your form compiler is all there is to it.
The mono people always release a VM with the latest version... and indeed you can download it from here:

http://www.go-mono.com/mono-downloads/download.html
Watch out Wikipedia, here comes Britannica 2.0
Try being both a "frat boy" and a "jock". That stereotype gets tossed around quite a bit in geek culture. It's fairly frustrating.
This article looks like it leapt right out of a "Fringe" episode.
Obama can keep his blackberry
But Tesla is starting from scratch, not decades of experience. Provided they can learn and improve quickly they should hopefully be more competitive soon.
'Flying Car' Goes to Market
the truth is spoken here.
He had, but his Beard Mass Index (BMI) was heading towards "clinically obsolete", so he's trying to cut down.

;)
I think most new DSLs are either Ruby under the hood, or extensions to Tcl or Guile.
Not yet, but poker is socializing :)
Hypothetically?? This can already happen! Check out identi.ca. It uses Laconica

http://laconi.ca/trac/

which is "a Free and Open Source microblogging platform. It helps people in a community, company or group to exchange short (140 character) messages over the Web. Users can choose which people to "follow" and receive only their friends' or colleagues' status messages. It provides a similar service to sites like Twitter, Jaiku, and Plurk."

I'm surprised no one has taken steps to avoid relying on Twitter.
Microsoft announces layoffs of upto 5000 people.
Those chapter titles sound quite Dickensian.
Apple proposes audio sensor to auto-adjust iPhone ringtones
Zimbra founder quits Yahoo
How to Enable Hotmail POP3 access in Your Country
How to Enable Hotmail POP3 access in Your Country
Is a GED More Valuable Than a PhD?