skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a difference. A chord is always composed of multiple notes. There's no single note that can sound like a chord. But a colour like yellow can be generated by a single wavelength or a combination of wavelengths that average out to yellow (so long as those wavelengths are not too far apart).

So in colour there is no sharp dividing line between a 'chord' and a 'note'. Some 'chords' look like 'notes' and some 'notes' look like 'chords'. Magenta is interesting because it's always a 'chord'.
Maybe for now, you could more manually garden the landing page, using feed of recent comments, so even if they're infrequent, they can be emphasized.
The same is true in Mathematics. Most PhD programs and some maters' programs require proficiency in German, French, or Russian.
"Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with."

A philosophy is warm fuzzies, but the contract that is the TOS is what matters.
Match.com -- good way to fund a husband? Well... some people say yes.

I personally would never be so desperate as to give this company a chunk of revenue in exchange for matching me with a business guy. If you truly do not know anyone with whom you want to start a company, move. Really. Moving costs less than giving these jokers 9.9% of every sale.
Labels want $13 million from Pirate Bay as trial starts
Yeah, if you look at the literature surrounding the things he's created (hacketyhack, potion, etc.), you'll notice he talks pretty normal when it's about serious stuff.
I'm trying to keep the homepage as free of clutter as possible but I do think this would add a bit of personality to the site (as opposed to the sterile, crowdsourced feel that you mentioned before). I'll have a think about a creative way to put this in.
To be fair, for that 9.9% they cover payment processing fees and do some income tax paperwork. I'm not sure that what they do is worth 9.9%, but it's not as if they're taking the money and doing nothing for it.
I don't just read code for the hell of it, I'm usually trying to get something specific out of it, so usually I try to figure out where the core of what I'm reading is at (starting with grep), occasionally cutting away the surrounding code and perhaps irrelevant comments with my editor.

That said, I'm not downplaying reading code; it's an important skill. But you don't have to just read the code of the masters; you can jump in and add to and fix bugs in stuff from a wealth of OSS projects and there you'll get feedback from those folks too as you get involved.

I personally get a much better understanding of a block of code if I treat it as a living thing and hack around with it seeing what breaks it and what makes it go.
I need to read more code... but when I do get the time to read code I never start with "main" I start by searching for a feature I am interested in and then branching out to see how this feature fits in with the whole.
I normally use N++ and open a huge number of files at once, its important to me to be able to switch between files quickly and I don't want the bloat of an IDE.
Why can't we go whole-hog on the "manager as servant" direction, then? Content creators hire/fire their managers. Money flows from those actually making it, downward. In tough times, people downsize by firing their boss. You give your manager performance reviews.
Thanks for that.

I'm sure there has been a discussion of this article before. But I get the feeling that you disagree with it's predictions. I'm interested to know which points you think are off & why.

The conclusion was that VCs are in a worse position. Investment needs to get smaller & to maintain their investment sizes VCs will need to buy shares from founders.

1 - Software Startups need/want less capital because of (a) lower technology costs (b) lower promotional costs (c) smaller teams.

2 - IPOs are less likely. This results in (a)the lower risk/reward goal of acquisition being set as a target. (b) less capital needed for the IPO process. I've added in point b

3 - Sellers' Market. (a)VCs' structure dictates investment size & fund size (as mentioned above) creating a surplus. (b)VCs are competing with acquirors offering a lower risk option. I imagine the current climate dampens these

I suppose the last point is most debatable. It may be temporary. The VC industry may contract or move away from Software. But if 1 & 2 are correct, this should result in smaller investments, founders cashing out or some combination of these. Do you see these points as being incorrect? Am I missing something else?
this is a dupe, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1694
and a rerun a couple of days ago, also, it isn't news, it's two years old (I missed that on the first reading...) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=479009
In my experience, writing a lot of your own code teaches you MUCH more about good design than looking at others'. Most of the design process is actually in the reasoning behind WHY a certain process was employed, which is not easily evident from code alone!

But since you asked:

(1) Run the code and understand what the software DOES. If a library, write a driver program which tries out most of the functions.

(2) Look at the high-level classes (or the major organizational structures, e.g. source files) and figure out the purpose of each (e.g. CLogger -> logs errors to a file or the display)

(3a) (the fun way) Come up with a cool, simple feature you'd like to add, or something simple you'd like to change. Do it. Repeat.

-OR-

(3b) (the boring way) Find the main() function and step through the code with a debugger, stepping over function calls which are self-explanatory. Step into ones you're unsure about.

In reality, this all depends on how well the code is written. Understanding some code just isn't worth the price of admission.
I don't divvy up the time. I just try to find time for each category.

It's a mistake to think of yourself as some kind of content consumption machine -- leads to splitting up your hours into 3-minute increments. Some folks love that kind of anal-retentive life. I find it gets in the way of being a human.

So I have these major kinds of reading goals that I think about when having some extra time. It's a general guideline. Kind of like using a compass instead of a stopwatch (apologies to S. Covey for the ripoff)

Most of these are in the Out-there category, but not all. I've found, for instance, that lots of philosophical concepts dovetail with software construction -- philosophy of language, of knowledge, of abstractions and generalizations, etc. No matter the topic, I've found there is usually some tangential relationship to strategic learning goals.

One of my current Out-there books is "Dummies guide to Songwriting" I've always been curious as to how a few guys can get together and make some wonderfully creative musical material. Who knows? There could be a lot of material in there applicable to my next startup effort.
some 'notes' look like 'chords'

When?

[severely edited, trying to fix bad writing]
I believe this was posted for the humor value, no? I mean, the writer doesn't even realize that the word "qualia" is plural.
Addmired (YC W08) looking to hire web and iphone hackers
Want to make games?!!

Hot startup looking for excellent developers!

Who we are:

Addmired is a next gen iphone game development company building viral and engaging social games on the iphone. Their flagship title, iMob, rocketed to the top 10 list in a matter of days.

The ideal candidate:

You love games. You love coding even more. You're talented, energetic, and a self-starter. You're comfortable with working in a startup environment.

We offer a competitive salary w/ equity and cofounder status.

If you don't fulfill every requirement, but you’re a smart hacker, we'd still love to hear from you.

Please send a resume, cover letter, and links or samples of your work to jobs@addmired.com

Positions:

1. Web/Network Engineer

Required:

- At least 3 years of OO/Java/C++ development experience

- Experience building database applications against MySQL

- Experience building scalable, complicated web-based application with high performance

- Experience with agile software development practices

- Knowledge of best practices for the design and implementation of large-scale systems as well as experience in taking such systems from design to production

- Excellent problem solving ability and detailed knowledge of object-oriented design and programming

- Solid coding practices including design, unit testing, and peer code-reviews

Desired:

- php/apache/mysql/javascript experience

2. iPhone Developer

Required:

- At least 3 years OO/Objective C experience

- Experience developing in Cocoa framework

- Experience developing on the iphone

- Excellent problem solving ability and detailed knowledge of object-oriented design and programming

- Solid coding practices including design, unit testing, and peer code-reviews

Desired:

- OpenGL, 3D graphics experience

- Video game development experience

jobs@addmired.com
That's pretty impressive. I will check out your site some more.
Gotcha. How about this then: The users are putting in some nice personal words about each of their submissions. However, these extremely valuable words kind of appear as if they're coming from the vendor's site (watering them down, making them seem like catalog copy).
Suggestion: Put the words and user's avatar closer together. Move the vendor-link farther way.
This will emphasize the conversation. Perhaps even go crazy with a word bubble shape a la Twitter?
Those companies are also less likely to die or do massive layoffs, which is part of The Fear of being on a temporary work visa. Having an international HR department works wonders too.
The middle to higher end of that range, maybe more. It only tends to happen in high valuation deals (usually later funding rounds) so a little stock is usually worth a lot.
I know virtually nothing about YC so it seems off for me to be jumping in on this. But is YC really pioneering methods of investing.
Aren't the other components: motivation, introductions, community, promotion, etc. more substantial the the "investment" element. I guess you could call those things investment too, but not capital investment. Basically, is YC in the same industry as VCs at all?
> replace all passwords with a set value

They're storing passwords directly and not hashes? Wish I could ask you which company so I could avoid them...
Google Shuts Down Business Pages For Mobile Ads
I would prefer a high-CPU usage, extremely inefficient embedded Flash text display applet. It's the Web 2.0 way of doing things.
You want to offer value? Pay your fucking employees.
I agree with the concept that you can not get an intelligent engineer to work for equity only with out become a founding member. However, I disagree with the notion that it is simply because of the lack of a fancy title. It is because of the level of sacrifice one has to make. Ones livelihood becomes intrinsically tied to the success of the company. Additionally the work load would be somewhat equivalent to the other founding members. Any reasonable person then would conclude that they should reap the same rewards as the other members.
Usually with a cross-referencer, like Doxygen.
This is a good question and one that I have been wondering about lately too. I'm really not familiar with the products in this market. I was looking at this: http://www.riapedia.com/2007/06/06/flash_and_php_based_acrob...

This is worth looking at too. 60.00 a month is a good price: http://www.webex.com/smb/web-meeting.html
@auston, descriptive = non-trademarkable!

With the 2 names I've had to choose one was brainstorm -> short list -> check trademarks -> check domains. This lead eventually to "Barefoot Ceramics" (a paint your own pottery studio, http://www.barefoot-ceramics.co.uk). One of the top names "Ty Pots" (pun on teapots and "house of pots" in Welsh) I really liked but we discounted in because it's just too clever and can't be dictated easily. Barefoot is sometimes misspelt Bearfoot, but rarely - it's a term in pottery as well as being a reflection on the relaxing environment and earth friendliness we've tried to build.

The other was choosing a name that was a double-entendre from my location and the nature of the activity, I chose early and then scouted around for domain variations using different TLDs. This lead to BridgeHosting.net (web design, SEO, internet hosting, http://BridgeHosting.net). The pun is "connecting people" and that my location has lots of bridges.

My personal webspace is at http://www.alicious.com - I chose that because it can be an ending for various subdomains, eg "web.alicious"; noone can spell it or pronounce it!
Even Amazon takes only 7%, with a lot of services on top. Give them the benefit of the doubt, and they still want 2.9% of gross revenue(!) for being essentially a jobs board locked-in to a specific payments processor.
According to the write-up on Wired (http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/01/magnolia-suffer.html), Ma.gnolia also took a snapshot of the page being bookmarked. This may account for the size of the database.
Perez Hilton Calls for Facebook "Boycott" Amidst Content Controversy
I'm not sure where you get 1% opposed? The group of opposing scientists seems to be growing every year. Even back in 2007:
"Challenge to Scientific Consensus on Global Warming: Analysis Finds Hundreds of Scientists Have Published Evidence Countering Man-Made Global Warming Fears "
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/news_press_release,1...

And more recently 31,000+ scientists signed this petition opposing man-made global warming:
http://www.petitionproject.org/

Does this mean there are 3.1 million scientists in favor of the Co2 theory? Not that the quantity in either direction really matters, its the facts that count.
The reality is that the Web is so big now that you can start smaller firms for next to nothing in lots of niche markets. That doesn't mean VC is broken, it just means that smaller firms can exist without it. You're not going to start Amazon or NetFlix without follow-on capital. You can start a Web gadget company that makes $50k just fine though.
Closer to the latter, we are cooperating on a revshare basis. I didn't really think of it as an "acquisition", and frankly when I saw the headline I was a bit shocked, first thinking that Ben had sold our site to someone =)
Github is very good for reading code since it can be done through the browser. If I am going to be using a particular library, I take a look at the commit history and read the code on the more interesting commits.

Also, hanging out on IRC rooms is very helpful. Many people ask for code reviews before committing to the libraries and you get to see how the library evolves and what are the design decisions behind the changes.
I think more magenta : colour :: alloy : element
how do you protect yourself from scammers? i.e. someone using a stolen credit card to buy from themselves or someone doing a chargeback after an item is shipped.
I was nodding in agreement at most every point, and then I wondered why there are no citations and whether Aaron has experience successfully using this strategy.
Profile the code. Once you understand where the time is spent, its probably the main loop of the program or atleast will give you a clue to the main function. Ofcourse you can ask someone or read the docs, but profiling it has the added advantage of giving you the map of implementation to the intended algorithm.

Further when you profile you can get a call graph nicely drawn out using many utils available online. This instantly gives you a big picture.

I also second stepping in, adding feature, fixing a bug etc.
If there were ever a time when we needed Lawrence Lessig to step up to the plate and go "Chill the fuck out, I got this", it's right now.
If you've never worked with lawyers on crafting a new TOS for a new kind of service, it can be easy to misconstrue the legal jargon to imply evil intentions. But likely it's just that they've identified where they need to be clear about what they can and can't do with the information you upload and share.

I haven't read the TOS thoroughly, and IANAL, but what Zuck says sounds perfectly reasonable as far as I can tell. They identified a particular nuance of their service (i.e. the fact that once you share something with people, they need to be able to display it for ever to whom you've shared it with) and need realised they need to cover themselves legally against it.

It strikes me as proactive and sensible arse covering in what is a hyper-litigious society.

If you've a problem with the TOS I believe it to be a problem with the unfortunate legal wrangling, that large companies face to protect themselves, not with some evil intention of FaceBook.
Off the cuff answer: because he'll get all the girls.

Real answer: I think the problems implicit in cloning are foremost. Assuming we're able to surpass those, we have the inherent ethical issues of bringing a human-like (and possibly more complex/intelligent than humans) being into a very strange environment.

I think we should do it, if we can guarantee a reasonable likelihood that he or she will not endure an inhuman amount of suffering, but there are a lot of ethical issues that have to be addressed. Who will raise him? How hard will we try to give him a "normal" life and prevent his inevitable celebrity from affecting him? How will we determine if he's competent to own property, attend school, live on his own, etc.?
All very good suggestions. Thank you.

I've been trying to think of ways to illustrate the code in a graphical way but it's not really working for me. A conversational approach makes more sense. Thanks for all the tips.
Reading code for large systems is rarely fun. I usually start with a specific objective, a bug or feature, to teach myself the system. I root around until I arrive at a solution. The first bug is expensive, but they become cheaper as I learn. I have tried systematic top to bottom examination, but I find my mind quickly turns to glue.

Good tools are essential. If you are programming Java, use eclipse. I hated it for the first year, but now I tolerate it. Whatever your language, use its IDE. I am also partial to UltraEdit. Write some good tools. I wrote a version of unix find for Windows among other things.

If you want code that's fun to read try the Python Cookbook. http://code.activestate.com/recipes/langs/python/ is a good resource.
Justin.tv Is Turning Porn Queries Into Cash
I think a mark and sweep algorithm on the information would be a better strategy
Ask HN: Google search for 'sex' 'xxx'
when you type 'xxx' or 'sex' into google pornhub is the top result for both how do they do this competing against so many millions of sites???
This is wrong. This current recession is the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Unlike 1973-75 and 1981-82, we now have a recession in the real economy and a banking crisis. This is a disastrous combination. The last time we had such a confluence was, in fact, during the Great Depression.

Taken individually, a recession or a financial/market panic can be quite painful, but rather easy to remedy. The 1981-82 recession, for instance, was brought on by the Fed raising interest rates to draconian levels to rid the economy of inflationary expectations. This produced a sharp downturn. But the Fed was able to engineer a rather quick turnaround by simply lowering rates. Likewise, a financial crisis can be quickly contained with little spillover into the real economy. LTCM in 1998 is a prime example: LTCM's failure produced a mini-crisis in the credit markets, but a bailout by Wall St firms contained the crisis before it could have many negative effects on the real economy.

But a recession in conjunction with a banking crisis creates a self-perpetuating downward spiral. As banks face losses on their balance sheets, they hold back credit, and hoard cash. When interest rates reach the zero bound this problem becomes more acute, because the potential gain from lending to people in a bad economy does not outweigh simply holding cash. This is a liquidity trap. Additionally, consumers not only lower spending because of less access to credit, but also because they're scared, so they save more. But because banks are hoarding cash, rather than savings being reintroduced to the economy through bank loans, this money is kept within the banks. The money supply shrinks and deflation makes debt burdens larger in real terms. And the cycle of forced selling and lower values feeds on itself.

The experience of the Great Depression was that there seem to be multiple equilibrium points within an economy. Economies can contract much more than classical economics tells us they "should", as the cycle of debt-deflation pushes the economy downwards. This is true of the money supply as well. Creating inflation seems rather straightforward: have the Fed print money. Indeed, as the Fed has injected unprecedented amounts of liquidity into the system the last few months, many commentators have begun to worry about inflation in the midst of near deflation. But we don't understand money creation as well as we think we do. We have more of a credit system, and less of a fiat one, than we acknowledge. So with a liquidity trap, creating inflation can in fact be a challenge - hence Bernanke's idea of dropping money from helicopters. So what makes this crisis scarier than past nasty recessions is that conventional policy is out the door. We're trying to fix a system we really don't quite as much about as we thought we did.
Perez = The New Arrington?!
I'm not trying to impute evil motives to Facebook and I understand why they're doing this. I'm just pointing out that blog posts about philosophies are trumped by contracts and it's ridiculous for Zuckerberg to expect anyone to take his words seriously.
Nashville and Memphis both had their borders redrawn a few years back to encompass many of the surrounding towns. The inner city is no better than it was in the 1910's, the borders are just different and so the stats are different.

Also note that trauma care is much, much better now than in 1900. All things being equal, you'd expect a much lower homicide rate now. In 1900, if a guy gets shot three times in the stomach, he's a statistic. In 2009, he makes a full recovery ( http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/07/crime_d... ).

At any rate, the point remains that many of the once great American cities - Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cleveland - are either in ruins or feel like they came out of the movie Blade Runner ( http://www.detroityes.com/home.htm ). This did not need to happen. The fall of these cities was the result of particular decisions made by particular political actors, and we are all poorer for having lost them.
They are the 29th most visited site overall in USA. And #1 for porn.
Blogs like sensationalism - it's how they make money. They're not different from any other site.

First there was the whole newsfeed=evil deal, then there was the Facebook CIA thing, now it's the TOS. Anything that'll get a lot of paranoid people riled up.
Perez's traffic is bigger than
TechCrunch + Techmeme
And then a few multiples...
thats it? They've been asking that much from 6 year old girls who shared a bunch of mp3s.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg responds to privacy concerns
I'll have a play around with swapping the vendor link / avatar ...thanks for all the ideas!