skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the best class I took in all of high school we read this book cover to cover. It can be a little bit repetitive but as soon as I read the title of this post I immediately thought of this book.
From experience, I have concluded that whether mathematicians become good programmers depends on whether they have an engineering aesthetic. Mathematical elegance and engineering elegance are not exactly the same thing. A mathematically trivial solution can be a huge practical mess. Mathematicians with no engineering aesthetic can't see the difference and tend to produce big blobs of unmaintainable code. Mathematicians with an engineering aesthetic are some of the best programmers I've worked with.

I've only worked with one philosopher. He's very creative and produces reams of working code, but new requirements always mean new reams of code. Everyone suspects there must be a lot of redundancy in his code, but then, nobody has needed to look, because it all works....
If you wouldn't be confident programming it yourself, try to find someone who can provide a resume and at least 3 good references.

As long as you do your research, you can increase your certainty that your coder is legit and not out to steal ideas.

To be honest, I would recommend learning a bit more about MVC and OOP and just creating it yourself. Most applications are pretty rough when first launched. Just make sure you plan the project out to the best of your ability and keep scalability in mind. It is inevitable that you hand the project over to a more experienced coder so you would need to prepare for that as well. Hope this helps.
Good call on this..
Engine Yard Solo gets much lower pricing
The "WRONG" ones have some commentary:

http://wrongtomorrow.com/predictions/26
The idea to pay CEOs in cash is a good one and it would make big difference, but for obvious reasons it will never happen.

Because every decent CEO can get a much, much better deal, no sane/good CEO will agree to a worse deal for no reason.

OK, a very few might, those would be the exceptions that confirm the rule.

But I seriously doubt that even a single major company will ever announce a CEO deal like that.
Too bad the FSF is in the process of obfuscating the GCC exception with some language about Eligible Compilation Processes in an attempt to regulate GCC plugins.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-3.1-faq.html
I would either partner with a developer, which in effect would give them equity or you hire a contractor or fulltime developer. I would imagine that you would have to give them specs. Otherwise I'd assume they would take a hand in crafting your idea, which is something it sounds like you want to prevent.
Jeff needs to define his terms.

The problem is that what Dijkstra means by "competent programmer" is not what Jeff means. It's not just that they are talking about different levels of competence – they aren't even talking about the same discipline.

Dijkstra may have meant something like "doing meaningful work in computer science" or "solving algorithmic challenges". Jeff Atwood seems to mean something like "gluing libraries together to accomplish a business objective".

At the beginning of Jeff's post, it almost sounds like he has something interesting to say about the Dijkstra quote, but that's just because he confusingly uses the same word to mean something almost completely unrelated. As he says "the vast bulk of code that I've seen consists mostly of the 'balancing your checkbook' sort of math." I don't think that's quite what Dijkstra had in mind. Likewise, I suspect finding new algorithmic approaches to tough computational problems is not high among Atwood's interests.
I just have to put in another plug for GUILE. I've written a sizable chunk of my day-to-day shell scripts in it and it is such a pleasant environment in which to work.

Are there translators out there, for perl, python?
SGI clearly had the cutting edge graphics technology and hardware - In my mind, the 3D video cards killed them very quickly and made SGI obsolete. As you may recall, when the 3Dfx Voodoo's were hitting the market, SGI did nothing at all, thinking that they still had the market cornered. Then came ATI, Creative, Nvidia etc. Back then there was the delineation between 'gaming' video cards and 'workstation' video cards, the latter having the premium price. SGI could have positioned themselves in both areas, especially the workstation cards.

It was a classic case of a large, entrenched, slow moving company getting thwarted by startups. Too slow or unwilling to act / react...
You Need An Attitude Correction
Fair enough. Perhaps I'm thinking too much in this list. I just wondered what set Sam apart from other YC founders.
Yeah, I really do like a good April Fool's joke... It's just that they're all so predictable now.

It's kind of like... "You mean site X has always done X and now it will be doing the inverse of X? That's preposterous!! O WATE - APRIL FOOLS U GUISE!!!"
No, it's still simple: don't mix GCC with proprietary code. Code that gets output by GCC and inserted into other executables is still fine.
I found a pretty fascinating article on zdnet about suppliers.It seems like most warez scene material comes from a few source.

Physical insiders who actually work for the the company who produces the software. Company employees have easy access to company materials. This also includes the packers at packaging warehouses. This is usually how pre-release material gets pirated.

Credit Card fraud is used to purchase copies that are pirated. This brings more unwanted attention, so is frowned on.

FTP snooping. A lot of software companies have full versions of products on their websites.

Hacking. Sometimes companies are actually broken into. This is not very common.

Social Engineering. Sometimes companies are fooled into sending review copies to fake reviewers.

Demo cds. Once the licensing scheme is cracked, key generators are made for the demo cds.

Retail versions. Groups race to buy software and crack it immediately after it is released.

It sounded like most suppliers did it for the recognition and excitement. One supplier actually said he would quit his high paying legal job to work as a janitor at AutoDesk, because he would be able to pirate more software. And occasionally people get compensated for it. One warez group had members in Intel in the 1990s, so every month the top supplier would get free Intel hardware. And sometimes groups will pay suppliers with access to material to stay in boring jobs.

Piracy guide:http://servv89pn0aj.sn.sourcedns.com/~gbpprorg/2600/piracygu...

free zdnet paper:http://whitepapers.zdnet.com/abstract.aspx?docid=265302

zdnet account info:http://www.bugmenot.com/view/zdnet.com (note: the bugmenot registration request is an april fools joke)
Apologies. Using the phrase "billionaire" was exaggerated. (I think that billionaire before 25 has happened twice or thrice?) There are, however, many, many young tech millionaires.

My point, as I said before, wasn't that I was critical of him, and - again - I'm certain he's on the list for good reason. I just want to know what qualities in particular elevate him above all those other people who could have been included.
The Arts and Letters Daily (at http://www.aldaily.com/ ) covers these topics well. Usually just three new links per day. They hit this one Monday.

(satisfied customer since 1997 or so ... digging foxhole in anticipation of "web 0.1 design" outrage ... "works great for me" defense ready ...)

P.S. scan down ALDaily's first column for the tale of Orwell's son. Not literary, but tells the mettle of the man, which is also good to know.
Not cruel. Not unusual.

Just poor taste spam.
People don't view philosophy that way because philosophy never gets far from words. Philosophy and math started to fork at the point where people realized that substituting words into logical schema and then using logical transformations to create new sentences doesn't work reliably, and in fact doesn't really aid thought at all except by suggesting possibilities. At that point, logic became a philosophic failure, a dead end. A curiosity at best. There's still kind of a conceptual overlap; a philosopher might find it stimulating to think about the concept of N-value truth systems. However, he wouldn't think that mathematical theorems about such systems have any strict philosophical consequences. They would just be spurs for thought.
Or wondering why an obviously-rich foreigner is so stingy as to haggle down a few cents that mean nothing to him.
I was sure Hacker News would get "hacked" for April Fools.
I love Ruby. I love that code can be so short and yet easily readable. It might be slower and perhaps more memory-hungry than other languages, but for my needs that's usually not an issue.

What I do miss are good, well documented, stable libraries. For example, I currently process RSS/Atom feeds with FeedTools, whose own creator says he's tired of maintaining (I totally understand him and am extremely thankful for the time he put into it). I assume if there were more people coding Ruby, there would be a better chance someone would step up and take his place. So, having a community that is more welcoming to newcomers would eventually benefit us all.

By "open to newcomers" I don't mean that Ruby-celebs should stop posting snarky comments at each other in their blogs. This is pretty negilible. I mean stuff like having better documentation, for example, online, free, in googleable format (rather than screencasts or print books). IMHO PHP3 annotated online docs back in 1999 were significantly more usable than what Rails has to offer now.
Your questioning is quite justified. Unfortunately, San Francisco is on par with Chicago in terms of corruption and the way to win votes and keep your job is by siding with tenants.
Not really. It looks like they are carrying a considerably amount of debt (half a billion). They list their assets at some $100 million below that.

I'd be surprised if a lot of the core patents/IP hasn't already been sold off.
yeah - perhaps a general sos messaging system would be better...crime could be a subset
Read the article, particularly the table at the end. After 1 year of experience, the years of experience make no difference to your rank, except for people with an "average of scope and skill" of 1 (out of 6).
"It wasn't pure suicide, Microsoft helped."

A common theme running through the history of the industry.
If you peruse the Bloomberg wire and keep track of stock analyst predictions, this site could grow into a "forecast analyzer" of stock "experts." Of course, someone needs to login and edit whether the prediction was correct.
Seems to be down at the moment... and now it's ok. Weird.

I agree completely with sethg... I had this idea floating around, and it's nice to see it. Do make it easier to see some statistics, and see wrong/right predictions, as that's a bit more interesting for the casual browser.

BTW, it's really slow again.
"Heck, even one of the managers at 37s wrote on their comments section that when they have customers complain, they encourage them to send them emails and not post on some site out in the middle of the ether."

Yes, it's hard to do tech support via any third party that sets themselves up as your representative.

"Hypocrasy much?"

Among all the people who talk about honest, transparent communication but are unhappy that this wasn't settled under-the-table...I'd say arguably so.
Neo in "The Matrix"
How to Write an Elevator Pitch
Why Facebook Can't Succeed
It's pretty easy to avoid. Just use a string class. Or check buffer length for things like URLs.

For format printing, I wrote a custom lsprintf (limit string printf) which has as its first argument, the maximum length of the string. lsprintf will never overwrite past that.

I'm surprised sprintf isn't mentioned in this.
I'm not the parent but I'll reply anyway.

I have very few issues with Ruby as a language, in general it let's me get from thought to working code quicker than any other language I've used. Honestly the largest issues I've run into with Ruby typically deal with people trying to be too clever.

Ruby certainly provides a lot of ways for people who want to look incredibly clever to hang themselves and anyone using their code. I typically avoid libraries or frameworks where clever code is the norm (I'm looking at you Rails), and because of this I tend not to have too many problems.

It's certainly not perfect, and I've been frustrated by bad error messages, stupid type system mistakes, etc. But I've found that those issues simply replace issues in other languages.

I still feel that Ruby gets me from Thought to Code quicker, and for the kind of projects I typically do, that's worth dodging a couple of warts.
Rita Levi-Montalcini - first Nobel prize winner to reach 100 years
The mythical Google server revealed (video)
Typo: Sam instead of Sama in the last 2 para's unless you meant SamA
How to make an undeletable folder
It probably happened once, that someone deleted a folder ,which is containing a few hundred files and was very important.If you’d like to avoid anything similar happening in future.You can protect your important folders by making them undeletable. Here is simple tip, which can help you.
Which is all well and good, but I can't seem to access the damn thing.

Or rather, my device isn't supported. Curve 8330, bought it on Monday and was rather looking forward to this.

Perhaps it's the fault of my carrier... I have a hard time thinking they're restricting the 8330 from the App World, as it's a rather recent handset.
I think this would be a more valid point to raise if we were discussing GS's complaints about a cease-and-desist order from 37S.

I also remain a little puzzled at the pretense that Fried's post was some off-the-cuff rant.
it incentivizes him to hire less talented people

This seems spectacularly unlikely given Joel's other writing and the fact that he's running a profitable company, the profits of which substantially depend on the quality of staff he hires. Saving 1% of payroll and giving up any substantial "edge" in development is a bad trade, and regardless of your opinion of Joel, I suspect he's smart enough to know that.

All the same pathologies seem to remain intact in this system.

All of those same pathologies sound to me like pathologies with the people not the system, and the solution is to just recognize that people who can navigate themselves around small obstacles are actually more valuable. People who complain at year-end about why they couldn't acheive their maximum potential need to be steered into a mindset where next time they find a speedbump to drive over or around it, not to stop and complain about the uneven pavement.
I was surprised not to see Richard Branson in there. To me, he and Steve Jobs are two people that, like PG said about Sam Altman, will get whatever they want. (music, retail, air travel, soda... for one; personal computer, music industry revolution, taking over a big marketshare with the first phone, Pixar... for the other)

And you can be sure that they would get to where they are again in a very short time if they were to start from zero.

Richard Branson has the added bonus that he seems like a cool person to spend some time (on one of his islands) with while Steve Jobs has a pretty bad reputation on that side.
Are you sure? I thought they had a really experienced BD guy: http://www.loopt.com/about/executives
Slightly less/more interesting is that who didn't make the list. RTM.
Thanks for the clarification. And yeah, I agree with you, I'm quite fond of Joel's system on the surface.
1) do not use rentacoder, elance, or similar services. you get what you pay for. if you're looking for help, look around the established developer communities. HN is a good start. i also like the job board at freelanceswitch. there are others.

2) Q:"What's to stop the coder from just taking the finished product and running?"
A: a contract

3) my suggestion would be to hire a freelancer or a development company and pay them their rate, and if you like their work, consider offering them an equity bonus to sign on full-time.

p.s. your website doesn't do anything. you should fix that ;)
They make millions because the market price for a CEO's services are very high.
Theoretically, across the board decreases. Given the profit sharing though, I think by the time he did that, it would be pretty evident that there was a major hardship to be distributed amongst the staff.
Freelancers - Ask for more
Lots of freelancers here. This has helped me increase my revenues by doing the same thing I always do: bust it. Hope it helps a few of you.
->"I assume if there were more people coding Ruby, there would be a better chance someone would step up and take his place."

Is it more the fact that the community is small or that fewer people share their code than in the Python community? Just wondering.
This is a good post, and presents a topic that is too often pushed to the wayside in web design.

One thing to consider is the path the user takes through your site. The examples in this post are all single-page examples, but often the AIDA process can be better achieved over a 2-3 page browsing experience, where the information is presented in an easy-to-understand sequence. Visitors don't necessarily read your pages top-to-bottom.
Not all of them. For example:

http://wrongtomorrow.com/predictions/47
I'm not sure why everybody's gotten their panties in a bunch over this. It seems to me that users got free traffic out of the deal, at least the way I see it: If I had gotten the e-mail, I certainly would have tweeted about it, and people who hadn't seen the prank yet would probably have thought it was cool enough to go check out my slideshow. After I realized it was a prank, I probably would have tweeted again, bringing in even more traffic.

Is the argument that it added lots of erroneous Twitter posts? Get over it. You tweet when your eggs are too runny, a single tweet about a slideshow isn't gonna hurt.

Are you saying it makes the people who fell for the prank look stupid and unprofessional? You really think being the butt of a joke on April Fools Day is the end of the world for your public image? It's Twitter, not your company's quarterly report.

I, too, get tired of the endless barrage of April 1 jokes that flood my favorite sites once a year - its a little excessive, and in this case, not even that funny. But those that are calling for SlideShare's head in this situation either have too much time on their hands or need to stop taking themselves so seriously.
Good eye. (Not that I can think much of any counter-example, there's still no explanation.)
The military do not take kindly with jokes. They tend to return with gunfire. So most likely, people would not take it as a joke.
On the topic of the applications of mathematical thinking to programming, I immediately thought of this:

http://www.zedshaw.com/essays/programmer_stats.html
Google's Entrance Into Venture Capital
Notable features:

12V-only power supply

Built-in UPS (you can see the battery hanging off one side)

Double-height DIMMs (presumably they allow high capacity at low cost)

Otherwise it appears to be a relatively conventional 2S Xeon server in a cheap case.
Two responses:

(1) I agree that it's unlikely that these problems affect Fog Creek in practice --- although how would we know? But the point is, Spolsky wrote this to advocate for a practice in your company, where this formula probably won't help you.

(2) If "people" didn't have irrational issues with salary negotiation, it wouldn't matter how you handled salary negotiation. The purpose of a system like Spolsky's is to neutralize those problems, and it succeeds or fails based on how well it accomplishes that.
The evident difference between you and and me is that I won't take a generality like "San Francisco is corrupt" and use it to attempt to win any argument about crime in the state of California.
I don't think people are unhappy that this wasn't settled under the table. No one is saying that any of these concerns were unfounded.

But I AM saying that it was irresponsible for 37s not to give GS the chance to rectify the situation before deciding to go ahead and try to ruin GS's reputation. Had 37s first dealt with this privately and then blogged about the outcome, it would have been a MUCH different blog post (or perhaps not if the accusations proved to be correct).

"Yes, it's hard to do tech support via any third party that sets themselves up as your representative."

I would argue that it's hard to deal with any criticism that you don't know exists...
1. Don't try to learn to become a programmer. You'll fail miserably since it's not your sweet spot.

2. Don't go after elance and other pay-for-hire sites.

You need a technical co-founder, someone who believes in your product and is willing to work very hard and do whatever it takes to make the product a reality. Contractors do not fit that mold.

Personally, I started a community with some friends to help people find technical co-founders, so you may want to check it out (http://fairsoftware.net).

By the way, the problems you describe about protecting your IP are exactly why we put a strong legal framework in place (the Fair Project, govered by the Software Bill of Rights). Even if you don't use the SBR, feel free to post a description of your project. People have found technical co-founders through our site, so it can happen.

And then HN is a good place, although I'd hate to see it turn into a bulletin board of wanted ads.
There's definitely a market. The biggest competitor is not Evernote but 3M.

Actually, my app has been around a bit longer than Evernote.

A lot of my customers have told me that they switched to ShoveBox from apps like Yojimbo or Evernote because they really like its interface and the inbox/message/rules metaphor it uses.

I don't really have to beat Evernote -- though I certainly want to put a dent in. I wrote a syncing engine for the new app that's actually pretty abstracted out and device-agnostic. So I should be able to get a cloud-based solution rolling pretty quickly if I decide that's the right way to go.

But right now, I'm not so distracted with the idea of murdering Evernote. I'm living off the income from my company now -- I don't understand quite how -- and I'm delighted every time another sale comes in. And any incremental improvement in those numbers is awesome. I have ambitious sales targets for the rest of the year, and so far I'm meeting them. But what I'm doing is decidedly not a startup. The goal isn't to take over the world, but to be profitable, do good work, and be happy.
What's your team so far?

1) you: the "idea guy"

2) a designer ("another" designer ... so you're a designer too?)

A great hacker is more key to making something great (and profitable) than a great designer.

IMO, the team should be either:

1) hacker, hacker

2) hacker, semi-hacker/semi-bizdev/semi-designer

3) hacker, bizdev

or something like that.

* Hewlett Packard was #1.

* Google is #1.

* Apple was #2: Woz and Jobs.

I think you've got the fundamental mix of your team wrong.

Put the idea on hold and start networking to meet hackers.

Go to Ruby and Rails get-togethers with a stack of business cards. Look for the crufty kid who looks like he sleeps in a cardboard box with his skateboard. Look for the fat guy with the ponytail and beard. Look for the quiet guy who never talks much. Chat these folks up, give them your card, and find out why they're studs (or, if they're not studs, find out who they regard as studs).

Meet these folks for coffee. Throw your idea out there. Listen to their ideas (coming up with ideas is the hard part).

As a matter of fact, ignore your idea.

Keep networking.

Sooner or later you'll find one or two other guys who you click with, and with whom you've got a lot of mutual respect.

Then do something with them.

It probably won't be the idea you have right now.
That's a really cogent analysis.