skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Noob to Ninja Programmer. Possible?
Hi. First post here. Please go easy on me! :)

I know nothing about programming. I wouldn't know the difference between Ruby on Rails and
Python if it hit me in the face (remember - go easy! ;) )

I'm wondering if it's possible/feasible, for me to teach myself enough programming to start
making some software/website prototypes? This is from a starting point of knowing _nothing_
other than a little HTML and having some laymans appreciation of MySQL databases.

Thing is, I feel like a frustrated programmer. My actual training is a PhD in genetics (so
I'm not thick, innit!). This is intensely annoying, because I keep having "internet start-up" ideas.
I know my ideas aren't too bad - as most of the time when I start researching them, I
realise someone else has recently started the same thing! However, most of them are the
sort of thing, where if I could programme (should I be saying "hack"?), I could make it in
my spare time and then test its potential. As I can't programme, all I end up doing is
getting frustrated - kinda like a burning feeling inside.

I have, kinda by accident, worked as a project manager on the re-design and re-launch of a
"business intelligence" tool - essentially a reasonably complicated database with business
information in it. I do enjoy all kinds of web-geekery, and I think I have a good
appreciation, if not understanding, of the technical aspects of web-apps, web-design,
databases and, to a much lesser degree, actual programming.

I'm trying to persuade the programmer, with whom I worked on the above project, to join me
in a start-up, but I'm not sure he's that keen. If he doesn't want to do it, I don't know
any other programmers and I'm left with these ideas burning a whole in my head.

I just wish I could do it myself. Oh If only I'd been born 10 years later I might have
taken an interest in computers as a kid!

So... in your honest opinion, is it possible enough for me to learn in my spare time,
enough programming, to make a prototype start-up website? I don't mean some crappy HTML
page, but something database-backed with some sophistication. Should I just forget it and
try to persuade my programmer friend, or just ditch the ideas altogether? If you think I
will just waste a year and then not be able to produce anything do say. I do realise that
good programmers have it in their DNA and have been hacking since they were knee-high to a
jumpy thing.

If it is feasible, where do I start? I've seen plenty "beginners guides to <<insert
language>>" etc., but they are all for people who already code. Not complete noobs off the
street!

If it's not possible (which I doubt it is), where does a man with ideaz and no skillz turn? If I had a bunch of cash I would pay someone to create my visions!
probably angel = him doing the investment/research by himself and VC = other people involved, either as other investors into the fund or as employees
Is it fraud if it's accidental??
yeah, we need to fix or warn about that better. the reason that the airline searches don't work reliably is that most airlines only serve a few airports, and if you search for airports they don't serve, the result is not always handled gracefully. some airlines prompt for a known airport - some just give up and display an error. to counter this, we would need to maintain a list of all airports served by each airline, and only let users launch valid searches to the airline sites. i think that is good from a usability perspective, and it's definitely doable, but maintaining it is time-consuming. that's why we haven't done it yet. but, we may well get to it soon.
Absolutely. "The Sun" is word of God in my book, too.

But speaking of the Divine, my personal revelations have disclosed that image to be an RJ-45 fossil - an "ethernet of the Gods" if you with - and therefore far antedating Atlantis. You heard it first on HN.
Playboy Q&A with Google Guys [2004]
Ma.gnolia 2 was launched at Gnomedex2008 in August 2008, so it's something that has been in the works for a while. Here's the video of his presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0P6cTPS8_4
Marc Andreessen joins the VC ranks
I am not a TDD zealot, nor even a TDD advocate. (I haven't written enough stuff that way to know whether it works well for me, never mind anyone else.) I was just pointing out some flaws in your reasoning. I don't think I'm the one being religious here.

I don't agree with jmathes's diagnosis that you're trolling; I'm sure you really believe that I am a fanatical TDD devotee who thinks TDD is the right thing for every situation, that I regard everything to do with it as sacred and holy, and that I think TDD can make up for lousy programmers and lousy code. Since none of that bears any resemblance to the truth, however, I'm going to leave it here, and just suggest that you go back and re-read what I said, and see whether you can find any actual evidence of zealotry there. Then, when you don't, you might want to work out what's got your zealotry detectors so oversensitive and made you draw such stupid conclusions, and maybe think about fixing whatever it is.

Anyway: enough.
I don't see why you shouldn't leverage branching in any small, personal, non-shared project. I got in the habit of making a branch any time I want to try anything out, after all most of my small projects are experimental in nature, and branching is perfect for experimenting with changes and ideas that you might otherwise be afraid to try using a single, linear history.
Every programmer started as a 'noob' so it is absolutely possible to do so. The question is how much time you have to devote to it.

It sounds like you really want to do this so I encourage you to try. If I were starting out I would just focus on a single language and not worry so much about a Framework. For example learn Ruby, not RoR. Personally I prefer PHP, but I know Ruby is just so popular.

However, it takes brilliance or years of experience to really be able to build things well. In the short to medium term I think you could expect to build working prototypes on your own, but if you want to build scalable systems fit for users it will be a challenge. That said, the more you know the easier time you will have working with other tech people.

Good luck,
Jer
Extra credit (if not credibity) for very spiffy graphics. If only reality were that cool... we wouldn't even need hype.
I think your troll detectors are miscalibrated, though not as badly as lgriffith's zealot detectors. But I think you're right that there's not much point in trying to carry on a reasoned discussion with him on this topic. Sorry, all.
I know this may seem very childish, but give this a shot: http://poignantguide.net/ruby/

edit: my contact info's in my profile, don't hesitate to bug me with questions, no matter how silly you might think they sound.
Parser Generators Considered Useless?
Is there anything like Yojimbo but simpler? Some program for me to jot notes and clip things that doesn't reformat text or give me tons of filters? Yojimbo and Evernote are both too bulky for my tastes. Anybody have any recommendations?
This is a good start, though not as comprehensive as we're used to. Currently we use WAPT which is significantly more comprehensive while still maintaining the ease of use that most other comprehensive tools lack.

That said, it would be great to incorporate some of their features such as different scenarios, load patterns, particular series of pages, random, etc. It would be great to not have to have a dedicated resource to run the stress tests, it's also tricky to know if the local bandwidth can properly emulate x number of machines.
You might want to check out the "Stats 202" course which is based on a class given at Stanford. R is the tool used throughout the course:

http://stats202.com/

All lectures given by David Mease at Google have been recorded and are available online:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query...
increasingly, travel sites are letting people do those kind of flexible dates search, which is a promising trend. you're right, for the time being tripeedo is primarily a different UI (though one we feel is more user-friendly), along with the benefit of only entering trip details once.
"wealth is created when you use labor to add value to natural resources"

That (the labor theory of value) is exactly what all the classical economists (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx) got wrong.
Most web communities are politically polarized in one way or the other. If you do not like the political stories, Reddit allows you to unsubscribe from the politics sub-Reddit. Or just don't visit the site.
The article doesn't state that a blog would have difficulty making money because businesses wouldn't pay for money. However, the article explains why Fake Stev Jobs didn't earn much dough despite the fact that he attracted a lot of eyeballs.

Also I don't think a blog has a business model inbuild. Slamming ads on something can be part of a business model, but is not a whole business model.
The whole world would probably enjoy much higher standard of living than we do now. Do a thought experiment, and remove any 1st-world nation from the world, and see whether it would help or hurt everyone else. In my mind, it would hurt every time, so adding more 1st-world nations would therefore help every time. There's no reason to suppose that our current proportion of rich societies to poor ones has any special significance.

Yes, it would help some large groups of people if the US were gone, but this is not because US profits from them. If anything, US loses wealth roughly in proportion to its brutality. Besides the obvious example of Iraq, there is also the "war on drugs" and its effect on the Latin American nations. Actually if everyone was 1st-world, I suspect there would be less of this pointless aggression, because US citizens aren't as able to dehumanize people who aren't poor.
sorry about that - we try to make it clear that new windows open, by saying so in the instructions on the left, and also displaying a message when more than 5 airfare providers are selected. how could we make it more clear in a user-friendly way?
This is very impressive indeed. My own efforts from a few years back (http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/torus.html) are very primitive by comparison.

However, you can still see the effects of Canvas's stupid approach to rendering antialiased filled polygons.
i detect bias :)
V8 has a lot of good ideas in it; compiling to native code is one of them but far from the only important one.
> Correlation != causation

You obviously haven't read any of the source research. What point are you trying to make?
we try to warn (in 2 ways on the homepage) that popups will be opened. how could we make it more clear in a user-friendly way?
There's a fundamental difference: a slim group of Digg users push everything. On Reddit, the circlejerk is encouraged by the users. I've been a user for 3 years (just deleted my second account and banned the URL yesterday), and people like those posts. I upvoted a few myself before I felt it got out of hand.

A lot of people discover atheism and politics on Reddit, and it's wonderful for them because it's showing them new things. For everybody else it quickly becomes a problem. (It's a problem on HN too, to be fair: I've gotten into a few debates here with atheists who think religion is wholly awful, and their immediate reaction is often "if you don't hate all of religion, you're buying into a cult/a conspiracy".)
Useful unix tricks - part 3
it's custom built. the site is rails hosted on heroku. ruby already had some decent time/date parsing, and there is a great natural language time/date library called chronic that helps out too. but otherwise it's custom-built.
How to Use Multiple Twitter Accounts on One Gmail Account
I'm getting the same error: http://tlrobinson.net

I have GA, Disqus comments, TipJoy and Reddit badges, and a few other little things.

Maybe you could have an option to restrict it to your own domain name.
Maybe things are different in Sweden, but under common law that's pretty difficult, especially in copyright where some situations have never been tested in court. A lot of lawyers were going around saying that Grokster was obviously legal while others were saying it was obviously illegal. IANAL.
No. You are simply wrong. Here is a chart of the ancestry of European-American individuals across 587 SNP markers: http://dienekes.50webs.com/arp/articles/greekadna/price.jpg

The appropriate approach to that chart is to believe our lying eyes, yes? Even with that (relatively) small amount of genetic data, three racial groups are readily apparent, with the Ashkenazi Jews standing out quite drastically.

And since you brought up IQ, it's interesting to note that the Ashkenazi tend to average 10-15 IQ points higher than the rest of Europe. Check out this article from the Journal of Biosocial Science: http://homepage.mac.com/harpend/.Public/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocs...
this sounds like a firefox issue. if you choose to enable popups for tripeedo.com, then firefox should remember that choice. let me know if you find otherwise...
He said he wanted to focus more on music than code. I think he's doing pretty well for himself.

Also, he can absolutely code - and the code of his that I've looked at has been pretty awesome on all accounts.
Slate's reporters set me on edge. Quite a few of them take extremely one-sided views of topics and get very arrogant about their position. As a result, I feel myself repelled subtly when I see a Slate link, and I've seen a lot of similar Slate criticism. Trounced? I'm not certain.

For what it's worth, Salon's literature articles are still among the best out there. Slate can't touch that division of Salon.
Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?
"I will have to do a research on this."

Angus Maddison is the man with the data.

http://books.google.com/books?id=UNgbMMwlgmcC&printsec=f...
yeah, that's one option we're thinking about. we went with popups initially because 1) it's simpler and 2) it wasn't clear that loading up 10 windows in iframes would necessarily be a better user experience. it's something we're going to look at more closely. our approach to tripeedo has definitely been to try to keep things as simple as possible.
I don't get the argument that git is better for branched projects. I worked this way in subversion for years -- svn copy and svn merge work just fine. You can branch! You can merge! Huzzah!

Granted, git is a bit faster for branching (it can take svn a few seconds to set up a branch, especially if you're doing it remotely), but that slight time savings is more than offset by the time you spend reading man pages, only to learn that the various git commands really don't mean what you think that they mean (and don't get me started on the quirks and inconsistencies and bugs in git...)

I am not a fanboy -- just a guy who doesn't want to think about his version control, any more than he wants to think about his toothbrush.
The problem is that most stories about atheism is not posted in the atheism subreddit. Most of those stories spill over into worldnews or math or science. Stuff about conservative american commentators gets labelled 'funny'.

"Or just don't visit the site."

That was the solution yes. YCnews is fairly tame and people are well mannered.
I doubt that Osama bin Laden is socially isolated. Wouldn't he be surrounded by his "minions"?
Being pressured isn't always the problem. Seduction is a bigger issue. My ex-girlfriend had an affair with a teacher when she was 15, he 23. (You cited 16, but 15 is fairly close to that boundary.) It was entirely voluntary, and when I talked to her about it she got very indignant: in her mind, her consent was all that was necessary, and if it was voluntary then it was all right.

The problem, as my parents explained to me when I was younger, isn't that you're not physically ready, because after adolescence starts you're physically primed for sex. The problem is that before you've matured to a certain degree, you're not mentally ready to handle hormones, and while I think that's completely fine between, say, two high school kids who lust after one another, once you're in your 20s and you realize that these younger children are easily taken advantage of, then your using that is despicable.

While I think better sex ed would help a lot, I agree with the current age of consent in the U.S. Eighteen means you're old enough not to be taken in by somebody as easily. The rules about child porn need to be changed, because becoming a sex offender over "sexting" is stupid, but the rules about having sex make logical sense to me.
It shouldn't be too hard to come up with a kernel extension that allows you to do this - in fact I wouldn't be surprised if there already was an undocumented ioctl() that links a particular inode on a file system.

Alternatively, the sledgehammer method is hitting the power button: a fsck should be able to pick up the nonzero refcount and make it available in lost+found. (depending on the file system)
frankfurt/main is now the top match for 'frankfurt'. :)

the way to specify an airport if the top match is not right is just to keep typing. eg:
london => london all airports (lon);
london gatw => london, gatwick (lgw);
lon hea => london, heathrow (lhr)

similarly:
sa fr => san francisco;
sa di => san diego

typing frankfurt/main didn't work because the slash was confusing the interpreter. i'm fixing that right now.
I don't think that the RIAA can really win any lawsuits based off of this.

1) They have to figure out who the people actually are, either through adept mass-Googling of the usernames or getting IPs that the users log in from.

2) There's only a small portion of the music that they can figure out is illegal from this--stuff they played before it was released. Even though they like trying to charge 10x for such songs in lawsuits, 1 or 2 albums won't be worth much.

3) I don't think that that's sufficient evidence to win a lawsuit (though maybe sufficient evidence for them to bully people into settlements as they often do.) I could have found the track list for an upcoming album and tagged any songs I have with the artist and titles of those songs.

Still, CBS definitely shouldn't have done that.
Jared Diamond isn't "anti-globalist". Collapse is a good book, but IIRC, he isn't attacking free trade, but the overuse of resources. They're two different things.
Site works fine for me in Chrome.

A lot of travel agencies have systems that actually can check all airlines for their flight information. I would suggest you look into that and run off of a hybrid between server and queries instead of waiting for an API and in the meantime tell people something is easy when in fact it really isn't. Most of my queries return errors on the pop-ups.
Using R from Ruby
I hate when hating popular things becomes vogue. It's one thing to rant about it in an enclosed area, but it's hardly news.
" Any mediators out there?"

The silent majority who likely don't give a rat's ass either way?
This is a bigger deal than just the arrival of a new VC fund. It is, as far as I know, the first VC fund run by hackers.

Almost all existing VC funds are run by business/finance guys. I know a total of two VC partners who write code. And one of the two only made partner last summer.
What Fonts Are Websafe in 2009?
What new things should it have?
Ask HN: White Papers, are they worth it (as a promotional tool)?
Hi,

I am contemplating writing a white paper about a topic relevant to my new start-up. However, in contrast to blog posts which are short; white papers, when done properly, are very time consuming. My audience is people in the business world (not consumers), so they like PDFs. I know enterprise software companies use white papers to get contact information that they turnaround and market to, but we (nimonik.ca) are going more the low-cost web-app route.

So, my question is: Do people read white papers and if so does it drive enough traffic to justify the time invested? Does anyone have a relevant experience?

Thanks in advance,

Jonathan

P.S. My white paper is titled: "How to leverage online communities for to build brand and gain customers". It will attempt to explain the differences of service based companies (linux guys) with traditional shops (microsoft) and how consultants and lawyers (my target audience) can use online communities in their respective industry (I am concerned with environmental issues) to make a name for themselves and get more business.
MacOS's spotlight feature is somewhat close to what you're describing - and it can be extended to index/search metadata from file formats not in its default list.

That being said, it would be nice if such abilities can be extended to 3rd party developers, so that I can query the OS with a string and have relevant files come back.
Thanks for the insight guys, this has only been up for two weeks and I really appreciate the feedback. There are definitely some bugs on here and you are right about me taking off those pizza chains(dominos, pizza hut etc...) I want to incorporate a lot of these suggestions into the beta version which should be coming out in a month or two, but it will be more a less a total makeover.
Ah, ok, it was Delicious, not Reddit.
Jef Raskin worked on an OS named Archy that also dealt with this problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy#Persistence
What are the problems you see, and why do you think they're hard to solve?
Like others have suggested, please require that before any testing. I like the concept of your site, but I really don't want people DOS'ing my site for any amount of time, even a few minutes. I know they can do it manually, but if you give a nice easy interface to help even noobs then that makes me a little scared of your site.

I'm guessing that you want to give a "live demo" to people, but I'm sure you could just show a demo report of a couple sites that have already been tested.
Looks extremely awesome and I'm excited to play with it! Definitely fills a need.
Angel = investing your own money

VC = investing other people's money and taking a management fee

In this case I would think Andreeson is both a partner and an investor.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46100

Beyond that, why not just let the users define their own boxes? Though I'm not really sure what multiple boxes can do that one box can't.
Artificial Intelligence in Comparison shopping
Wow, the recorder option sounds really cool. I didn't see that when I first scanned the site. Maybe highlight a bit more somewhere.
And what about bazaar? Is it better or worse than git?
I gave a look at the screencast and it looks pretty nice, I don't have much to suggest on that side.

However I went to github to give a peek at the code and I notice there's no LICENSE file (and I couldn't find any reference to the license anywhere obvious), so may I suggest picking one up? Technically you can't define your code Open Source unless you apply a proper license to it -- actually, I don't think anyone could legally use your code as of now, because even if you wanted it to be under the public domain, you should state it clearly (I could be wrong on this last statement, if so someone please correct me).
www.storyofstuff.com

We have finite resources. By using resources we are either doing it at someone in the present times expense, or someone in the future. By keeping more people alive now, we are possibly reducing the longevity of the human race.

Just to play devils advocate :)