skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This reminds me of a band that gave out stamps when you came to their concerts.

The top levels were awesome:

30 Stamps: Special Date #1 Dinner and dancing with Dave.

36 Stamps: Special Date #2. Dinner and dancing with either Jean, Mike, or Murray.

50 Stamps: Ass Brand. The Frühead gets the Früvous budgie-dog (Larry Boniface Clebdon) branded on their ass. This is administered by a member of the band.
Delete your nytimes.com cookies.
RoR has a for dummies book. Keep away from RoR. The article writer never claimed which one was better. I think Django is better just because it has no for dummies book.

On a side question for hacker news fellas: Who reads for dummies books? I mean who reads programming language books for dummies? Is there any practical use for them or is it just for people who don't know what they are doing but want to claim to know a language?
This was posted 2 weeks ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=427250) and deleted.
I bought agile web development with Rails 2 years back(appx) after hearing all hoopla about Rails. The quality of the book was comparable the Pylons online documentation (which has taken some interesting bits from Rails).

The django documentation has been consistently superior from day one. Its the only documentation I refer to when developing with Django. I may dive into the source code to better understand things infrequently.

The other documentation artifacts, like slides, produced by Django core developers are excellent enough to be reused in teaching django.

So, if the blog's author is trying to use no of books as a metric to prove anything, it may be something to do with the gullibility of the target audience and/or lack of solid documentation on the framework website.
> Incidentally he mentions that he's using mod_lisp

A cleverly laid decoy.
This could be said for any company. I worked at company "X", where middle managers and coworkers pissed me off too. Desicions would get pushed around and I felt hugely
disalussioned and ineffective. It's not surprising Google is the same way. What is striking is how quickly people left Google was. I've heard all the rest about low salary, but there bonus package is awesome if you're an engineer. So I've heard.

This makes me feel like I wasn't alone as a few people mentioned in the article. I think if you're ever to work at a large company again, you should set realistic expectations for what it is. It's great otherwise having the security, benefits and other amenities... but it's not for everyone as I suspect it wasn't for these people. Just as being at a startup isn't for the kinda people who find success in large companies.
#222 for background, something like #eee for common text, and light pale colors for vars/stings/etc. I found that #fff text on #000 bg hurts even more than plain black-on-white.

Also, overhighlighting kills my ability to focus - I use at max. 4 colors
Please elaborate. Your feedback can help me improve the explanation on the site.
I can get a building security job and code for more than $11 per hr.

He would get way better results by looking for co-founders as suppose to employees.

Better developers and a lot more work done for $0.
I always, always, wanted /. to announce the 'excellent' in the Mortal Kombat voice.
Looks like Postful is what I am looking for, I still can't find it via Google, thanks oldgregg!
Ask YC: What kind of desktop to buy?
So, I find myself in the market for a new desktop, and am having trouble finding anything that meets my needs. I have the rest of my setup (Kinesis keyboard, two giant monitors, etc) and just need the actual computer.

My requirements are:

-Under $1000

-At least 16GB of Ram (i.e., 8 DIMMs)

-At least 5 internal HDD bays, but I only need one fast (10K RPM+) HDD preinstalled.

-At least 4 CPU cores

-Supports Linux (Debian, ideally)

Things I don't care about include:

-How fast the CPU cores are

-What kind of video cards it has

-How big it is

-How cool it looks

Will anyone sell me a computer that matches my needs for a reasonable price? Or do I just need to buckle down and build it myself? (I've priced it out, and should be able to do it within my priced range, but I've found building computers to be more trouble than its worth)

I know the Mac Pro meets most of my requirements but it's a bit out of my price range at the moment, and OS X doesn't easily support all the software I want (I currently have an iMac, and I spend more time than I care to trying to make it behave like Linux).
hell of a story but its a dupe
why not? People are more likely to give their password than do some unfamiliar signup procedure.
It might be rational. Supposedly, they are looking for 10X-30X. If they expect a >20% chance at a 15X return or some variation of that.

Also their strategy may be to not make decisions 'as they go'. That eliminates the need to actually be able to make the above estimate, something that probably requires a bit of an understanding of the specific business. They might not expect to do much better by making decisions on the fly then they would by following a simple rule, not enough to justify all of the analysis time. They might expect to do better this way, like rule based stock market investing.

When it comes down to it, it's not really an issue with 'the VCs are dumb.' They may have been. But if so, only slightly. They also may not have been. The bigger issue is the discrepancy in risk tolerance. That's not really news.
Honestly, what a useless post.

AAARGH! I am continuing the cycle of dismissal!
That's a great point, I totally remember this. Everyone was like, 'We have scaffolding!'.

Now that I've switched from Django to Rails though, I have to say it is plesently surprising how nice of a framework it is... but from a Django to Rails perspective Rails is annoying to the point Merb has gained a lot of success. Anyways, I digress. Thanks for posting that image, had a good laugh about it.
Note that even YC's 'Series AA' model documents [1] give them effective veto power over exits. (See the term sheet 'Protective Provisions', (iii).)

Their power may in practice be wielded benevolently, but I point it out so people realize even fairly entrepreneur-friendly venture deals include this sort of provision.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/seriesaa.html
> Belkin's President: "So, it was with great surprise and dismay when we discovered that one of our employees may have posted a number of queries on the Amazon Mechanical Turk website inviting users to post positive reviews of Belkin products in exchange for payment."

But how do I trust them enough to know that he's telling the truth?
easy...just read some user submitted reviews about the company
because despite having only upvoted for a good while, my downvotes continue to not count. [...] I drift towards policing behavior

If you have downvoted a single user many times in a row, you might have triggered an anti-karma-bombing feature. http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com+karma+... I would email pg at this site to inquire, and be ready to apologize if an apology seemed called for. Good luck.
Google Knol Reaches 100,000 Pages
I think you are talking about BSO-Origin. I worked there for 4 years, and they called divisions "cells" for that reason. I think it worked wonderfully for IT services, and I wonder why other companies didn't adopt that model as well.

BSO-Origin also had something called "Environmental Accounting", where the environmental impact of each project was estimated, and a certain amount was re-invested in environmental projects.

The founder (Eckart Wintzen) was a true visionnaire, and unfortunately he passed away recently. Here is a great article about him, back from the 90s:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.11/es_wintzen_pr.html
I currently have an iMac, and I spend more time than I care to trying to make it behave like Linux

Really? OS X runs everything I've ever needed/stumbled across - for everything else I use a VM (e.g. I can't be bothered using a Linux 64bit cross-compiler toolchain on OSX, so I just do it in a VM).
I think there is also an incredible amount of competition for the junior faculty positions as well. One of my friends, who recently started a physics post-doc at Caltech is convinced that he will have to eventually go into the private sector to support his family, since there are so few faculty job possibilities and he can't be a post-doc forever. Luckily for him, he has computing and finance work experience from before he was in grad school.
That's only good advice if you can go directly to the consumer. Not the same when selling to the enterprise.

Once upon a time I founded a banking software company with my mates. To our surprise there were quite a lot of banks that appeared like shops founded by a guy and his mates as well. But still, they looked at us as if we were from a different star suggesting they buy green antennae and stick them to their heads :)
My first Django project was a "yet another blog in Django" type of site. This is how it worked:

1-day to do the html(very little html knowledge)
1-day to learn css and do it( i had no css or web design experience)
2-days slacking off
1.5 days reading documentation and writing code as i go along
0.5 days finishing the code and inserting the django template tags in to the html, also seting up the admin site and then killing off the project as a good experience.

As you might guess, i had no other web experience, except some simple html, i found the django docs to be extremely to the point and useful. I also had a problem with setting up django, and people on irc helped with that too.
SE530 by any chance?
Ask YC: If you avoid YC News for a week, how do you catch up on what you missed?
I always wonder what I missed after a hiatus...

[edit] What I really would like is a way to catch up on any 'hacker tips' type of articles that I missed. I found several useful commands in the recent "Top 10 tips for linux admins" post; I'd hate to miss things like this in the future. Can anyone think of a good way to identify posts as useful, as opposed to simply interesting?
idea 2

This is a Parallel Import idea, a kind of a grey market. These markets already exist in various niches & I suppose have some potential. (1) You can avoid competition from many big fellas - They can often be kept in line by various means. (2) It addresses an inefficiency in the market. (3) The shrinking world is an ongoing condition making this easier & easier for you. a few ideas:

a - I am not sure a 'buying agent' is necessarily the way to go. Seems like a high overhead.

b - Fashion is an area where retail margins are high anyway. Perhaps higher then your P(London) - P(Sydney) - Incentive to buy in this complicated manner. IE, you might make more per item simply buying @ wholesale & selling @ retail.

c - Parallel imports exist because of either price discrepancies or availability issues. The former is the bigger market while the latter might be more lucrative, given the right clients. If you can find enough people that will buy in $1-2K+ lots time (because they want things unavailable locally) you avoid the a & b issues altogether.

d - Maybe you could use the winter/summer discrepancy between England & Australia in conjunction with price discrepancy to create a double advantage. IE buy Aussie swim brands soon @ sale prices & sell in London in a month or two @ pre season prices.
I just had my mother-in-law pick up some Blundstones for me in Melbourne for about 63 USD, whereas if I want to order them in the US they're at least 145 USD. So I vote for #2 as well :)
Yep, I heard the same thing about ms... it really depends on the group there. That's an understated important point to consider anywhere.
There is no center of the universe.
Americans ;)
What is it you want. I used to ship in tea from Ireland to Another country, but what Australian tea can't you get everywhere?
It may be just me, but I was continually irked by the thread's subject line: "So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously."

I mean, seriously, it doesn't even make sensed!
Black background, green text. I've never managed to move past the televideo terminal!
It's funny how little we know (or at least agree) on nutrition. Even what you would think of as very simple issue, "does eating cholesterol raise you cholesterol?" doesn't really have a unanimous answer.
> But how do I trust them enough to know that he's telling the truth?

You can go on their behaviour in the past. In 2003, Belkin sold a router that would occasionally throw away the response to http requests, and replace them with an advert for a Belkin product -- http://groups.google.com/group/news.admin.net-abuse.email/ms...

More details here: http://67.43.12.89/~cabalama/weblog/art_49.html and here: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/11/0031204

I think Belkin are lying. Deceit is part of their corporate culture.
You can't, but not everything is a big conspiracy. He very likely is embarrassed.
My company makes people think twice about reply-alls. Check it out - http://vimeo.com/2543204
However I don't understand why Django did not gain as much as RoR did

Two reasons.

First, unlike Python, Ruby didn't have any viable web framework in 2004, so it was easy to attract Ruby developers.

Second, and more importantly, David is much better marketer than Adrian. He poked the J2EE hornet's nest and evangelized the hell out of Rails for the first year and really got the snowball rolling.
I keep a Yahoo Pipe of HN in Google Reader:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=23159aed1a913917f8...

It lists comments as well (up until Yahoo fetches the page for each article), so it's easy to sprint through them when I've missed days.
Well, my iMac tops out at 3GB of RAM, which makes running a VM a little tough.

As an example, yesterday I was doing some work in SBCL (Lisp) that required multithreading. Due to a bug in sb-thread in the Mac implementation of SBCL I needed to use a Linux VM. However, the 2GB of memory I could afford to devote to the Linux VM was insufficient (in fact, the entire 3GB would probably have been insufficient - that being part of the reason for the upgrade).

Take me at my word when I say I need Linux and 16GB of Ram (I could probably make do with 8GB, but I'd rather be future-proof with 16GB).
Been using Cobalt theme in Textmate (dark blue) for years myself.
working for CV must be a blast. Tell Jake and Amir that I'm wearing their shirt as we speak..
i had a vt510 connected to an openbsd machine in my bedroom about 10 years ago and did most of my unix work with it. since it can't display colors, i setup mutt, vim, tin, epic, etc. to only use bold/underline/reverse attributes for highlighting instead of different colors.

10 years later and i'm now using openbsd on a laptop and typing in an xterm instead of a vt510, but i still only use bold/underline/reverse in all of those terminal apps. however, i did switch from grey text on a black background on the vt510 to black text on a white background in xterm, but that's probably just because it's the default on openbsd.
I don't. I figure that if anything really good went on, somebody else will refer to it later.
'attention priority' is too vague/confusing. Maybe just 'priority' would be better. Or 'fame' or 'notability' or something. Hard to find the right word, but I'm sure there is one.
Exactly, you read somebody's tweets for the sole purpose of getting other people to read your tweets, and they only do that so that more people read theirs, and so on, you get my point. And then maybe, just maybe there is this chance that one of the tweets you read is actually not so bad and you subscribe. As far as I'm concerned, if someone has something interesting to say, he won't use Read My Tweets to get the word out there, he'd probably rather use reddit or some other place where quality of content does matter, and not how much time you have spent reading tweets from somebody else who you don't care about.

I'm sorry if I'm being a little harsh, but it is what happens with Myspace or Fotolog, but doesn't happen, or hasn't yet happened with Facebook or Twitter: becoming a stupid service because the users just want to be "popular". Sites like yours make that happen. And it's a profitable business, there are tons of morons who want to be "popular". It worked great for Fotolog, here in Argentina we have this sort of urban tribe that people call Floggers, they dress in a weird manner just to get "popular" and get tons of visits on their personal Fotolog pages.

I like Twitter because of the interesting thoughts, that's why I like HN too, not because it's a magic formula to Internet popularity. Please don't make it that.
Breaking Down Bernie Madoff
Most YC alumni are in the Bay Area. There are about 60 here, in all different stages. If you send me an email (pg@paulgraham.com) explaining what the ideal startup would be like, I may be able to introduce you to some.
My apologies. What follows is only a portion of what's in the talk.

1. The founders must sell. They must listen to prospects.
2. They cannot hire a VP of sales until they have learned how to sell the product.
3. The founders should view their business as a guess.
4. They can see if they are correct by selling, which will confirm:
a. Who the customer is (who will pay for the product)
b. How to talk about the product
c. If product has the right features
Vyper Logix Corp are peddling a thing they call “Django 2.0”
If you believe you have interesting things to say and are willing to invest the time to get many people to hear them, then I don't see anything wrong with that.
Thanks.

Every engineering company I have worked at had these legacy databases. They all allow you to enter information (not very well), see the information on your screen, or send a report to the printer.

Piping data to a spreadsheet is something almost everyone in the companies I work with (I am a consultant) could do. These aren't sophisticated users. Even the ones with recent EE degrees aren't programming in their spreadsheets. The Mechanical Engineers don't even know that you can.

What they do need is tools to analyze the data existing in these large databases. Switching to another database/interface is not an option.

To extend my original idea: Excel has a way to import data from a text file. It works ok. Select your field delimiter, etc. What would be awesome is if I could draw my own macro on the screen. Make it more powerful. Excel shows me how my input data will work in the spreadsheet. Do that, but give me more editing tools.

Here is why: the data coming out of these databases to the printer is structured. Every record looks the same. If I can draw what one case looks like all of my data will be entered to the spreadsheet correctly.

I know I am not explaining this well, but if anyone (including the YC group) wants me to elaborate further I will.

I would pay for a spreadsheet that has these 2 features. A large part of my job is analyzing data in my customer's database. I can provide my customer with more value if the data input to spreadsheet is trivial as opposed to me billing for several hours performing the task by hand.
what editor is this?
Reply-all doomsday scenarios seems like they could be avoided if reply-all is disabled when the count of recipients exceeds a certain number.

On a side note, one of my colleagues has a first+last name that is one hyphen off from one of our largest distribution (external) mailing lists. I usually IM him instead.
agreed.

it seems like the annoying "all the world is an i386 running linux" generalization has been updated to "all the open source world is on github".
There's a variant called "Programmer Dvorak"
http://www.kaufmann.no/roland/dvorak/

Most relevantly, it puts the brackets, parens, and other programming symbols as primary on the number keys, and the digits themselves as the shift-modified versions.

Seems like it'd make lisp/scheme/etc a good amt easier to type :-)

I'm up for doing a conversion experiment on myself, once I figure out what my new work keyboard's going to be... And if they're going to stop me from swapping it for a kinesis.
Sorry Google, You Missed the Real-Time Web
Yes, but at the same time I'd rather use a service where quality of content is more important than the time spent on a site reading somebody else's tweets you don't care about.
And yours is not a bad idea, but I, personally, wouldn't use it. Everybody is free to do whatever they want, I don't see anything wrong with that either.
Black Background, White Text.

If I SSH into a remote machine, I'm still in my normal environment. Another reason I use VIM as well. If I need to get fancy, I can SCP my .vimrc in as well.
I'm going through this crisis as we speak.

I was lured to IT during/after high school, and it seemed ridiculous to go to college at that time. Eventually I was persuaded to take classes after work, and managed to knock out most of the degree (PoliSci) alongside my full time job. I had an opportunity to do some consulting work for an NGO in Amsterdam while studying there, so I took it. Changed my life.

Now I'm finishing a Masters (back in Holland) and trying to decide what to do. IT work makes me happy in that I have a high sense of confidence about my work, and of course it pays well. But something's missing. A cushy IT manager position doesn't bother me... but remaining there in 20 years does.

Making the leap to some vague non-profit job is also scary as hell, but sexy from some sort of greater-good point of view. Unlike my IT capacities, the tools I gained from university are (mostly) soft skills that aren't directly applicable to specific job functions.

I've shared these thoughts with many professors and industry mentors, and one thing I will say is that many of them view the world as pretty polarized between "Enterprise" and "Altruism".

For my sake I'm hoping it isn't really so.
It sounds like your friend may have heard of and/or read this book: "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community". It's on my ever-growing to-read queue.

"In a groundbreaking book based on vast new data, Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and our democratic structures-- and how we may reconnect.

Putnam warns that our stock of social capital - the very fabric of our connections with each other, has plummeted, impoverishing our lives and communities.

Putnam draws on evidence including nearly 500,000 interviews over the last quarter century to show that we sign fewer petitions, belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less frequently, and even socialize with our families less often. We're even bowling alone. More Americans are bowling than ever before, but they are not bowling in leagues."

http://www.bowlingalone.com/
That's normal over a work week. I don't like to take my work home with me, but yesterdays hard problem tends to be quickly solved when I show up the next day. Which is one of the reasons I stopped working late unless I really need to.
This guy is living the dream! Way to go!
I'm not even sure if he had a name on the show, because it wasn't a big part. He was not the star of the show, and it might be stretching it to even say he was a regular. I think he was just on a couple/few episodes...? I believe it was broadcast out of Taiwan. He mostly just stands around in a suit with shades on, IIRC. That's why I seem to remember him as a Fed.

I heard him provide more information about the show in an interview or something...a friend of mine lives in Taiwan now and she sent me VHS copies of the show, but I don't have them anymore. I don't speak Chinese, so the show didn't have much context/meaning for me overall.

Sorry I couldn't be more helpful. Maybe you could email Ferris to ask him for more details?