skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing that makes a BIG difference is how much you travel. In my case, I've spent less than half of my weekends at home during the last year. For me, having local friends isn't super important because one way or another, I'll end up seeing my close friends several times. Plus, I have yet to live in the same city for more than a year since college.

If Derek's travel situation is similar, I can see why he wouldn't care too much about having local friends.

Edit: this seems to be the case. From one of his comments below: "Home was the place that I would just work. I was going to so many conferences and such, that all my social time was out of town."
Not to use pirated software to become better at programming. It was really a mistake.
Dings XML for crappy commenting syntax then gives JSON a pass for not supporting comments at all.

I love JSON, but it does have it's issues.
The reason the mayor said "an even number or zero" is because if he said "an even number", it's really obvious that many people with zero ending license plates would show up both days claiming zero was neither even nor odd, thinking they had found a loophole and/or that zero plate holders were lucky and special.

Explicitly including zero in the rule is not an assertion zero is not even, it is an attempt to head off the confusion, controversy, lawsuits, fights, and wasted time needed to later modify the rule when the inevitable controversy arises.
Paul Graham has mentioned similar issues several times in essays posted on his personal website. For example, he wrote in "What You'll Wish You'd Known" (January 2005),

http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

". . . . In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.

"Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. . . . "

In "How do Do What You Love" (January 2006),

http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html

he wrote,

"Sometimes jumping from one sort of work to another is a sign of energy, and sometimes it's a sign of laziness. Are you dropping out, or boldly carving a new path? You often can't tell yourself. Plenty of people who will later do great things seem to be disappointments early on, when they're trying to find their niche.

"Is there some test you can use to keep yourself honest? One is to try to do a good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don't like it. Then at least you'll know you're not using dissatisfaction as an excuse for being lazy. Perhaps more importantly, you'll get into the habit of doing things well."

And in "The Anatomy of Determination" (December 2009),

http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html

he wrote,

"In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like talent."

Mathematician Hung-hsi Wu wrote an article more than a decade ago, Basic skills versus conceptual understanding: A bogus dichotomy in mathematics education, American Educator, Fall 1999, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 14-19, 50-52,

http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall1999/wu.pdf

to point out that any distinction between understanding a topic and having basic skills in the topic is a "bogus dichotomy." The two go together like two sides of the same coin.
Home was the place that I would just work. I was going to so many conferences and such, that all my social time was out of town.
The Philosophy Behind Amazon Web Services’ Cloud Strategy
And here I thought everyone hated XML...
Engineering salaries at Silicon Valley startups
Why the critics are wrong about mobile advertising
These boards' power requirements are exceeding that of common USB ports - these ODROID boards in particular can pull about 6-7 watts alone.

Practically all boards have HDMI, nothing has open GPU drivers and admittedly few have X11 drivers (just OMAP, Tegra, and Raspberry Pi right now I think.)

Dunno what those 10 addons you're talking about are since you have relatively simple requirements outside of working X11 drivers.
Krypt - the Next Level of Ruby Cryptography
Link to original article:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-29/dollar-less-...
When Facebook was Fun
> sustainable businesses

Given that a lot of YC seems to come from PG's own experience, which involved selling Viaweb to Yahoo, I'm not sure "long term sustainable business" is necessarily what these guys are going to shoot for. And I think that's ok too: some people are just cut out for taking a business from 0 to 80, but not managing it long term.
12-24?

If you're successful you'll be working for far longer than that. Even if you're not successful good teams will continue to iterate or change ideas, which will often take far longer than 24 months.
Having a suite of unit tests I can rely on. It helps me avoid the paralysis that occurs when I wonder "what else might have been touched by this code I changed?" I can give that ? a couple minutes thought, write whatever changes I need, and then run the suite to see whether I missed anything. That factor more than almost anything else helps me write code quickly.
John McAfee has been captured/not captured near Mexico?
Wrote almost the same article a while back: http://blog.jupo.org/2011/09/12/open-source-for-you/
I still think the fact that there's hard cap on the eventual total number of bitcoins will make them long run deflationary, create a strong incentive to horde, and eventually act as a restraint on their use in commerce - after all inflation is a prime motivator when it comes to spending what you have now.
This comparison makes no sense, the two JVM's were designed with fundamentally different goals.

What they are designed for and what they are quite commonly used for are different things. Both are used for running my application code. Serious performance problems on one makes that worse, regardless of whether it is worse-as-designed or not.
which is clearly yet another, different use of "or". i don't know why people are quibbling about this point, the usage the article cites pretty unambiguously means "all the even numbers, and zero even if you don't consider it an even number"
Ben Fry: Organic Information Design
but himself falsely asserts that...

The author is female.
Probably beginning to practice Judo in 2003. I dropped 50 lbs and changed the trajectory of my life.
Why tie this to jQuery instead of making it standalone?
I'm not sure if this is up your alley, but, the game 'Spec Ops: The Line' is one of the most intellectually stimulating games I have played in a long while.

Spec Ops: The Line is one of the first games I've really seen traverse from the collection of descriptors we normally use for video games (childish, immature, time waster, brainless fun, etc) into the realm of what I'll call "deep media". I'll define deep media as the collection of literary and artistic work which is created not with the primary goal of entertainment, but with conveying an outlook or a perspective of the world.

Spec Ops: The Line is not a pretty, nor particularly fun game, but by golly is it good.
Is there any chance that there's a small "valley gold rush" effect going on, sort of what happened in the late 90's and early 00's in SV when people saw the valley not as an opportunity to build something awesome but rather ONLY to get funding and get rich?

From what PG seems to be saying, it's more of an organizational problem, and I'll take him at his word. However, I just feel like I've seen a lot of (admittedly impressive) people applying to YC because they see it as the path to easy VC funding and lots of press only. And maybe a resume booster. I can see the effects of that being that it becomes harder to identify who is earnest and who is not, especially with such impressive people throwing themselves into the pool.

Either way, I think it's nothing but a positive to see YC continuing to innovate and tweak.
Congrats, good luck!
yeah, not unexpected, but definitely interesting. certainly not a "fluff piece" as the grandparent was claiming.
Startup docu teaser #02: Steve Huffman (Reddit / Hipmunk)
I could just as similarly ask why the author even mentions XML ?
This is an interesting way to visualize it, but I think the only way to really grok the Fourier transform is to use it in several different applications, and understand its role in each.

A particularly helpful tangent is to play with convolution and see the many different applications that is useful for (did you know that the shadow cast by an object is its cross section convolved with the cross section of the light source?). Once you really get convolution, and really get its relationship to the Fourier transform, you will be well along the path to enlightenment.
Compare with the Nook Playstation video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?fv=mXiiaprv3do
One then might argue that the "or" is not exclusive in this context... but let's not be that geeky.
Excellent stuff. Along the same lines: Someone once told me that the difference between a professional and an amateur is that a professional keeps working on it long after it stops being fun.

This is true in the discussion of Penn & Teller below, as well as game programming, and probably all worthy endeavors. Wish I could remember the reference...
Examples? Your comment is basically content free here.
You could say an even number, which includes zero for that effect.
Downloading a pirated version of Visual Studio 6 over a 56k modem definitely changed my life in high school, and allowed me to write code I wouldn't have otherwise been able to. (I still have those discs, mostly for nostalgia's sake.)

Of course what changed my life even more was subsequently downloading Slackware Linux (on that same 56k connection!) and realizing that I didn't need to pirate an expensive IDE to write code...
This is material from a 2h interview with Steve Huffman, http://www.hipmunk.com/ It consists of scenes that I probably won't use in the docu but wanted to share with folks anyway.

Blog about the docu: http://startup-dna.tumblr.com/
Twitter: twitter.com/@startup_dna

The docu is about startups, venture capital, programming and education. I'm bootstrapping this out of my own pocket and it's my first documentary. My ambition is to make this film as authentic and 3-dimensional as possible. I'm showing accomplished entrepreneurs and underdogs who just started their businesses side by side and capture their insights about startups on screen.
If you have ideas for people I should interview and can provide intros as well, please post their names below so readers can upvote candidates they would like to see.
Feedback is much appreciated. Thank you!
"Of course cheap and accessible software would be a lot better, but there’s so little of that going around."

GNU.

I have no problem with pirating (except for the word). But why illegally download an expensive OS when better, free versions abound on the net? Stay legal, and have a more powerful, hackable OS to go with your clean conscience.
HTML emails in general are full of contradictions. I plan to use the templates myself and I'm really excited about them. To answer your question though, it's just important to realize that much of these techniques won't work in the majority of email clients. iOS and some Android built-in email clients are the ones that this will be great for. But at the same time you still have to inline the vast majority of your CSS to get a consistent result in webmail clients.

In the end you have to know your audience. At my job, we have a lot of corporate types who are checking their emails in Outlook and also webmail so the emails I create have only two style rules in the head of the document with the rest inlined. Email is just really fragile and I personally believe you have to resign yourself to the fact that your email will break for some of your readers. When I create a website I expect it to work beautifully for over 95% of people. With email, I expect it to work 3/4 of the time. Maybe more if I'm lucky. That of course depends on the complexity of the email's design of course.
* Infrastructure (schema support - DTD, Schema, RelaxNG; transformation - XSLT)
* No obvious document format (What encoding are the strings? How to escape characters?
* Only used to describe predefined object types (boolean, strings, arrays, dictionaries
* Hard to ensure the integrity of the data without interpreting the data from the interpreter itself (no external validation)
The Future of Digital by Henry Blodget
A common technique is to use a single image to limit the number of connections needed to grab them. If you want to pull them out (say, you only need one or two) any image program will let you crop (Paint.Net, Gimp, Photoshop, etc.)

Related SO Q&A:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4870292/css-icon-images-o...
More importantly, consider the hell that debugging that mass of templates, callbacks, overloaded functions, etc, will be.

And you WILL have to debug it. Even if your code is perfect, one day someone will stomp on your memory and you'll be looking at this stuff in gdb, cursing the day you ever heard of Boost.
seems that some urls with a query string give an error

eg make a purl for http://www.reddit.com/top/?sort=top&t=hour which generates http://purl.ly/www.reddit.com/top/?sort=top&t=hour which gives a 404
This is important to note every time someone brings up Mickey Mouse. The super old "steamboat willie" movies would be out of copyright, but Mickey Mouse would still be a trademark.

In addition, Mickey Mouse is perfectly legal to use in works of parody etc
How is COS separate from PostScript? It looks like a straight PS dictionary.
Some of my most enjoyable programming involved writing high performance multithreaded socket services with a copy of Advanced Windows at my side (back when tech books were relevant).

I do have a certain amount of nostalgia for the days when all programming was pretty much "close to the machine". Now we spend our time gluing frameworks and libraries together to create apps.
dunno man, congrats i guess? the web part of anything currently to me is nothing but sophisticated text processing.

frothkit looks wrong, reminds me a bit of asp.net.
And they probably perceived you as really smart instead of dedicated. :)

I noticed something similar happens when I want to pickup some basic skill I wish I had, like juggling, shuffling decks of cards, or emacs or walking the slackline: first it seems impossible, then I insist for a few days, many hours per day, sleep on it, and then its trivial.

But most people won't go to youtube to learn how to shuffle a deck of cards, and probably consider that very nerdy.
Protect Your Open Source Library from Oblivion
It is completely standalone. I've just added the jQuery integration for convenience. Please see the "standalone" tabs on http://wolframhempel.github.com/photobooth-js/ and the bottom line in the source that says "jQuery integration. (It's safe to delete this line if you're not using jQuery)"
or he's not, and this is a happy balance for him.

not everything is what you see on tv
As different as these two attitudes are, I'll stick up for Dustin Curtis by pointing out one thing he expressed in his post: the pleasure of owning a small number of things.

If I keep a small number of possessions, and their total value is a small fraction of the money I have in savings, I don't need to be too concerned about preserving them. I can easily replace anything that is damaged, lost or stolen, so these occurrences don't have to be a huge source of stress.

I like the idea of being able to go through everything I have and organize, clean and maintain all of it, say, once a week. If that's too much of a burden, that's a sign that I have too many things. Thinking in these terms also makes it very easy to give away things to lighten this load.

This thinking is partly informed by my experience maintaining software. Running and writing software means constantly keeping it up to date. New standards and new versions of dependencies are constantly being published, and security flaws are constantly being found, as Moxie Marlinspike certainly knows. Code needs to be updated to keep up with these things in order to be considered well-maintained or secure. Minimizing that burden gives you a better chance of keeping the quality high.
Parse is hiring Web Engineers. Come make mobile better.
Had a great time with you guys! Great post!
i left the bay area for the same reason
I disagree. inflation is _a_ motivator for exchanging currency for other assets/services. But i don't think it is a primary motivator. Inflation/deflation is only a strong motivator in abnormal circumstances. With 2-3% inflation my primary motivation for buying things is way more about the transaction itself (do i want this thing) than any concerns about finding a durable store of value.
I think if I were invited to an interview I'd bring chocolate.
RXQ v0.1 - RESTful MVC with XQuery 3.0 annotations for MarkLogic
I nearly got the light blue and green confused, and I have normal color vision. I think there are reasons to prefer tables, or perhaps something animated or interactive would work as well. (e.g. mouseover a term to get its description.)
This is such very sage advice. I salute you.

> The fact of the matter is the road to mastery is paved
> with tons of mistakes, tons of situations where you will
> feel like an absolute moron.

This is so true. Feeling like you're stupid is just part of the process. Try to ignore the temptation to worry about how it appears to be so easy for everyone else. You may have to work twice as hard as the next person, but do it. They say it's darkest before the dawn, and that totally applies to learning for me.

When I learned Windows SDK programming back with Windows 3.0, I really felt like I was not smart enough for this. When I learned functional programming in Erlang, I really was quite confident that this was too much for me to be able to cope with. I've felt stupid so many times trying to learn things that I finally identified it as a pattern, a sign that I'm about to break through as long as I don't give up.
Curious: what methods are you using for your analysis? Feeding data in some software, or just pen+paper+brain?
Old repeats of stuff like Friends or Scrubs on the TV and quiet everywhere else in the house helps me most.

If I have Spotify playing I end up always searching for the next song.
There were a lot of interviews this week. Far more people were interviewed than were accepted.
Origin of intelligence, mental illness linked to ancient genetic accident
I think it is scale. The success of YC is built on the success of their startups. Therefore, I don't see YC as a not a long term (I'm talking 20+ years) sustainable and scalable business model. Is their process reproducible? Yes. Are there deliverables reproducible? No.

If YC wants to continue to grow (financially), it could possibly:

1. Diversify - Perhaps start a pure VC wing

2. Segregate - Provide specific expertise in verticals (travel, hospitality, sports, etc), horizontals (like consumer web, mobile, etc), or regions (emerging markets, global markets, etc)

That being said, I can't help but think that YC employees probably struggle to understand it's ultimate financial growth strategy while at the same time realizing that in it's current state it's already an extremely valuable business and provides those involved with loads of continuous personal satisfaction both financially and psychologically. So while it may sound like I'm discrediting the organization, I'm dually jealous of the "good problems" they have.
I think that the real story is that alternative investments (e.g. venture capital) have really dried up. Venture capital firms across the valley are having a very hard time raising cash. Groupon, Zynga, Pandora, and the disappointment with Facebook's IPO have pushed away a lot of institutional investors. I don't see capital returning anytime soon until we see some big, successful Silicon Valley IPO stories.

(insider)
Let's start with the most popular: "Bitcoin is to the USD (and all fiat) what Kryptonite is to Superman."

People don't want a massive upheaval of the status quo. They don't want an anarchist, anything goes, regulation free environment. They want government involved in ensuring a level playing field.
It's possible to do video rates on e-ink. Epson make some very good chips like the S1D19120 or S1D13M01. How they've managed this in this form though, I'm not at all sure. Time to do some digging.
So I have a bunch of bitcoins, and I get to Iran, how do I withdraw some bitcoins to have local currency while abroad? Do I need to transfer to Dwalla first, and then wait for a bank transfer? Does anyone know the best way to convert my BTCs back into gov-backed currency when I need it?
congrats and please tell what the company does because Ich spreche kein Deutsch
You think that the experience of selling 1 company (viaweb) trumps over the experience of funding over 300 companies across 7 years, 2 of which are worth at least 1 billion dollars?

Thats like saying, given that Apple experience comes from building the first computer they must not know anything about mobile.

YC experience comes from doing YC itself.
He prefers to interact with many people at a distance(email, blog posts, phone calls, occasional visits etc.) rather than many people face to face (lunch meetings, networking events etc.)

It is just a matter of personal preference, being very local might be the right thing for other people.
One thing to remember is that the goal in many cases is not to build a sustainable business, but prove that there is a market for this thing (of any size). It's not unrealistic for some of the more oddball single utility "companies" to find themselves aquired and rolled up with other strategic acquisitions, and the lot of them presented as some sort of B2B enterprise package worth far more when summed up.

In other words, with VC backed companies, the thing these companies are making isn't really the product in many cases is it? It's the companies themselves. Just like a gear isn't really much, but add some springs, and a few other odds and ends and you have a watch that people will buy. But it takes a bigger picture visionary to figure out that the company that makes gears and the company that makes springs should be both acquired to make that watch company. Till then, they have to try and find their way by either spending their investment dollars till they can find that visionary, or find a market supplying micro-miniature gears to other watch making companies.

The founders and investors are rewarded for taking the high risk of finding out that there is a market for micro-miniature gears after the acquisition. But until then everybody wonders why one would want to get into gear making in the first place?

YC is basically in the meta-business business.
Developers about recruiting developers
thanks for the feedback man.
Every apple commercial since 1977
It doesn't depend on altruism, if everyone does it it just results in assortative mixing and you wind up hanging out with people who can stand you, if any.

It also avoids the common human-behavior anti-pattern where two people remain in a mutually self destructive relationship because each is under the delusion that the other can't live without them.
I'm guessing they talk about coin flipping precisely because nobody spins coins. They wanted to start off with something people are familiar with, then segue into what they really wanted to report.

There's a hint of truth in the title since they mention that coin flipping is biased 51/49 towards the side that was facing up when you flip it.
Cedvel - A Web-Based Tool For Designing Grid Systems
Seems that cats are involved?
Very nice product! Sadly, most guys here do not speak German. I'm thrilled to see how things go for you guys!! And yes, it seems the future for the cloud is local.