skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
House of Leaves is so good! I have yet to come up with a good description of what it's about, but I always try when I tell people about it.

I usually describe it as a story about a guy who finds a manuscript. The manuscript is a collection of essays that detail a documentary that was made about a house that randomly changes rooms.

So at the center of the novel, you have this really creepy story. But there are all the layers above that storyline that you have to read to get there. There's the storyline concerning the people who make the documentary. Then there's the storyline of the guy who wrote the manuscript ABOUT the documentary. Then you have the storyline of the guy who's reading the documentary.

Then there's you. You're reading about a guy who is in turn reading a manuscript about a documentary which was made about a house. It was so well done that at the end, I found myself not really sure what the hell I was reading anymore.

I'm still not sure what the book is, but it's certainly a stroke of genius.
12 questions, not 10, and this one seems relatively easy; I immediately saw the construction for andrewf's answer, which is actually the same as cperciva's answer because gur cynar cnffvat guebhtu gjb cbvagf naq gur pragre bs gur fcurer zrrgf gur fcurer ng gur terng pvepyr bs naqerjs'f pbafgehpgvba.
Was this written by a PayPerPost customer? Write what you know, I suppose.

Quote about PayPerPost: "Also, customer support (which they call `Customer Love') should be renamed to `Customer Whatever - ticket closed'."
"If you could teach a class on building "Web 2.0 sites" and produce the same type of results, you could charge any price for the class."

Facebook is not the internet. And these apps are not businesses.
I don't remember exactly where I read this, but here area a few good ad blogs to read:

http://mikeonads.com

http://ecpm.typepad.com

http://clickz.com/experts

http://andrewchen.typepad.com
I agree. Math is extremely subtle. And despite its nature as the most exacting and rigorous of sciences, the notation used in mathematics is anything but. Each author uses their own conventions. Abuse of notation runs rampant.

Sometimes the difference between theta and phi is more than just alpha conversion... some authors use certain variable names to communicate important properties that must be satisfied in the premise of theorems -- but without making those premises explicit.

A derivative is a 'special form' in calculus when it is so cleanly expressed as a higher-order function. And indefinite integrals introduce a mysterious constant, C, when really, what you're talking about is a multivalued-function!

I think math is pretty much the coolest subject one could study, but in many of the books I've read, the difficulty in understanding is evenly divided between the concepts and the author himself.
I don't think Netflix qualifies as in-house programming. IMO, when Joel refers to in-house programming, he refers to companies that have a core competency that has nothing to do with software.

If you work at an insurance company or tech support company, you'll be writing code to make lives easier for people who work at the company. Your customers are in-house employees.
My guess: the vast majority of the S60 devices are likely straight-up mobile phones, which may or may not have data features activated by the carriers. Ditto for windows mobile.

I think iPhone users are much more likely to have bought the device specifically for web browsing, whereas you're likely to see a lot of 'accidental' s60 or windows mobile users who just bought a phone, or just bought a phone with email capabilities.

Also, no one but Apple would actively promote the 2.5g service for web browsing (though having wifi helps). This is a marketing/user adoption issue.
Why not try to be an in-house developer for a big universities?

I haven't tried it out yet but I think it might be fun. Less pressure/stress/deadline and huge opportunities to roll-your-own web-app for students (in the area of 20-40k students). Salary wise is also great (especially those government funded universities).
- Brave New World

- Night

- Hitchhiker's Guide series

- Dark Tower series (Mostly just the first 4, though)

- Eats, Shoots & Leaves

- Just about any George Carlin or Patrick F. McManus books

- Wheel of Time Series

- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
The way to combat that is to convince your bosses that you completely understand why the business exists (to make money). Convince them that they can use technology to be better at that and the job will become a lot more interesting and fun.

If you're going to be stuck doing something shitty, it's well worth the effort to try and make it less shitty.
Bubble Bubble Everywhere
(I'm going to ignore the prohibition on "programming/technical books".)

- GEB

- SICP

- anything by Paul Auster or Hermann Hesse

- most Haruki Murakami, especially "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle"

- Joan Didion, "Where I Was From"

- Richard P. Gabriel, "Patterns of Software"

- Durbin, Eddy, Krogh, and Mitchison, "Biological Sequence Analysis"

- Italo Calvino, "if on a winter's night a traveller"
I currently work as an in-house developer for a University of about 30k students. While there is less deadline stress, it's not exactly like actually being a student again. We have cubes and an organizational bias towards Java-Is-The-Best-Solution-For-Everything.

That said, the people here are all happy. Employees get 22 paid vacation days a year, and the dress is casual, excepting meetings with the very high ups. There is no prototypical office asshole, and we usually have more money than people, so you have a lot of freedom to buy equipment you need or software that will solve a problem if it makes more sense than writing it yourself. It's kinda nice to be in-house and yet not have to reinvent the wheel. It leaves you free to tackle fun/interesting/non-cookie-cutter problems, rather than writing some ERP module that should be a commodity.
I enjoyed The Undercover Economist. I especially recommend it if you liked Freakonomics.
Three non-collinear points determine a plane.

A counterexample to your proof would be to draw a plane through three points, say near the top of the sphere, then distribute the remaining points on the bottom. Then you don't get a proper division by taking your plane as the dividing line, since a working version would require more than a hemisphere of volume.

Thinking in terms of x, y, and z axes is a red herring. The symmetry of the sphere makes them irrelevant.
You can keep track of the performance of Quicksort then fallback to Insertion Sort if Quicksort is sucking. This is how std::sort() works in most C++ implementations.
gliffy.com is great for mocking up pages and sharing them with others, I find.
Have you tried Gliffy [http://www.gliffy.com]?
Does anyone have any statistics about users and JavaScript?
Still, I enjoy Joel's articles. And some stuff he built was neat, like "how to ship things". Reminds me that I still haven't watched the video.

I also don't think that Web 2.0 sucks, but it sucks if people look down on real software. two-week rails projects will only get mankind so far, I suspect.
I've had good luck with OmniGraffle:

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/
What I plan to do for my first site is to to first load the page (javascript included) as if Javascript was disabled, and then have the JS rearrange the page (optimize it for javascript) if the code runs.

Any problems with that approach? It seems the most robust to me.
I feel the same, only my hatred is saved for lotus notes.
Which books/chapters? I love Psalms and Philippians, but I really love the beauty of how it all fits together.

(Not trying to belittle, just curious)
...until the auditors come in and tell you the shareholders don't like you innovating like that.

Trust me, even when your bosses are onside, in-house programming is a PITA. You're better off talking to your boss about how the product you made on your own is better than some of their in-house stuff, and that he/she should buy it.

Of course, that's got it's own set of problems.
Do you design sites for people without a mouse?

Do you design sites for people without a keyboard?

Do you design sites for people without a monitor?

Do you design sites for people without <you get the idea>?
SixApart sells LJ... so friggin' WHAT?!? Somebody PLEASE write the bigger story here.
In addition to Kaizyn's excellent point, making acquisition your corporate strategy is basically admitting you have a product that can't survive on its own. That's a problem - why can't it work without acquisition?
Valid point, although same applies to any type of bargain, be it selling a mass product or closing a one-off deal. Any business depends on a need to sell, and there's nothing wrong about it, except you may want to pretend you are doing Ok. Acquisition is generally the same game, except it's meta-business.

After all, doesn't everybody know YC depends on a need to sell?
Yeah. I've got a startup that's two weeks from launching (soft launch unfortunately) and I'm unbelievably excited about it. I'm giving this everything I've got because I don't think I can go another year or two not doing my own thing.

I currently work as an in house guy and it really is a PITA.
University Avenue is much longer than the downtown stretch. From 101 to the actual shopping area is a gorgeous drive through lushly tree-lined streets, and would certainly be a hike!
Acquisition as a strategy means the founder(s) want to move on and build new stuff. Why can't a company viewed as another product?
rot13

Gnxr n cynar guebhtu gjb bs gur svir cbvagf ba gur fcurer naq gur pragre bs gur fcurer. Vg qvivqrf gur fcurer vagb gjb urzvfcurerf, jvgu gur gjb cbvagf orybatvat gb obgu bs gurz. Gurer ner guerr erznvavat cbvagf, naq gjb urzvfcurerf, fb va bar bs gur urzvfcurerf gurer zhfg or ng yrfg gjb bs gur guerr erznvavat cbvagf (cvtrbaubyr cevapvcyr). Gung fcurer pbagnvaf sbhe cbvagf.
I'm with you. Good luck in your venture. Make sure you let us know how it turns out!
Because a large majority of consumers using your product do not want to commit to something that unstable.
Disney Looking Towards LA LA Land to Buy a Startup?
Who says all the start up action is just in the Silicon Valley? With Disney looking to acquire one start up per month, those LA cradled start ups have some great new opportunities.
OAuth Core 1.0 Released.
When ownership of a popular company changes, it doesn't immediately make consumers dump the product. They rather wait and they can give up basically when the new owner is doing terribly wrong. In general, consumers don't care that much about ownership.

What if Steve Jobs sells his shares and leaves the company? You can't even tell for sure if Apple would become better or worse after that.
Qbrf guvf cebbs nyfb jbex gb fubj gung nal A-1 bs A cbvagf qenja ba n fcurer jvyy funer n urzvfcurer?
I did this for a while. There are some good aspects to this job - you tend to get plenty of vacation, futher education and conferences are well supported. Salaries are only the low side in my experience, definitely not great - but when adjusted for pensions and stability (very difficult to get fired), there isn't much to complain about.

There are also some really horrible elements to this job. For starters, the stability - which sounds great - means that you will truly be surrounded by dead weight. Utterly unmotivated people work in some of these departments. It really got to me, to the point where I couldn't stand to be there anymore. A pension is great, but I'm not going to hover around for 30 years in a spiritually dead place (I'm not exaggerating here). I'll find another way to save for retirement.

Another problem is that the jobs almost never lead to the top. There are a few CIO/style or "Chief Architect" style jobs at universities, and those are pretty sweet gigs for those who get them. But if you have a job in a non-academic department, you're definitely a cost center, the definitive in-house programmer. There are very interesting projects in academic departments, but expect what I'd call a "parchment ceiling" - ie., you can't progress without the right degree. In a software company, people seem to like grad degrees, but if you can bring it, they'll put you in a high impact position with a lot of creativity and automony. At a university, the Ph.D grant-holder is in charge. Period. The dev is more or less a (decently paid and well appreciated) paraprofessional.

This was just my experience (I worked for a university as a dev for almost 3 years). Overall, I'd say that unless you really want the stability, don't do it.
No. Try an analogy with chance + bluffing + non-fixed, unlimited betting + imperfect information. Better yet, try to analyze poker.

My argument is not that EVERY game with chance + bluffing is more complex for a computer than chess. It's that poker is a very different beast than chess, and it makes no sense to argue complexity based on amount of required human training. Otherwise, we'd have computers with visual perception before chess skills.
Ab, sbe 6 cbvagf guvf cebbs jbhyq fgvyy bayl cebir 4 bs gurz gb or va gur fnzr urzvfcurer.

The leet key Firefox extension is fun.
You mean "sending hotness" is not a sustainable business model? :)
Web 2.0 sucks in the sense that if you could be working on real things, it sucks to be working on two-week rails projects. Clearly, sometimes you have to do two-week rails projects or other equivalently boring things in order to get rich, but that doesn't make them any more interesting to talk about, from a hacker's perspective.
Refer to my first sentence (Facebook was seen as the in thing on campus. If you had a Facebook profile, you were hip and cool and cutting edge.) to answer his question directly.

I can only explain everything after that to me being a blustery gasbag that likes to elaborate.
Cute. But I have to remind the makers that "bubble 1.0" was a stock market bubble. We are not in a stock market bubble. The people who are putting money into Facebook are not stock market investors.
Ha, my CS professor is in the middle of this video
I guess what irritates me is how ignorant these Bubble People are. Any economy can take a downturn, but if you can't tell the difference between Facebook (overhyped but useful service) and Pets.com (worthless), and you think that growth = bubble, you're ignorant. I'm sorry about that, but it's true.
The question is: Is it worth it? Your time is a premium and users with javascript off will properly not see any ads, so they will make no money.

This ofcause assumes that you are working at a typical web startup. YMMW
Pets.com had a legitimate business model: they had a niche market, invested in logistics, and they sold stuff over an e-commerce site.

If anything, bootstrapping something similar nowadays and being successful at it would make you look like a genius (a la woot).

What they did fail to do was exercise discretion with their spending. The strategy back in the dot com days was to over-spend in order for the marketing to tip them over. That was the strategy for Amazon from DAY 1 and it took them almost 10 years to make a profit. But Amazon survived because of good leadership while Pets.com obviously didn't because of bad leadership.

And as for Facebook, gee, a supposed 15 billion dollar valuation? Advertising models that's outright creepy? That's growth?

The first bubble was a catastrophe because it involved public money. The second bubble is going to be a headache because it involves private money. But nonetheless when the value of something is way more than the intrinsic value, it's a bubble.
Technorati Relaunches To Focus On Core Blogging Audience
You're not Steve Jobs and your company isn't Apple, it's a piece of paper. When the first thing you say is "I'm looking to sell this company", myself as a customer thinks: "The guy running it is only in for a quick payday, I think I'll try someone else."

Acquisition is not a bad thing, planning on acquisition prior to you even building something worth acquiring is something that probably won't work out too well. If you instead build something lasting, finding people to give you money so you can retire won't be that big of a deal, really.
Well, considering most of the buildings from the first dot-com real estate boom AND existing officers are still mostly empty, it's not as bad.
Ask YC: Does anyone here use jQuery?
... and if so, do you find it has a lot of IE-related issues? Or is that just with the UI libraries?

Just including the js files for the dialog and tabs components makes IE7 give me an awesome 'Operation Aborted' error page, which pretty much prevents debugging. While I'd love to just pretend that my users will have Firefox/Safari/Opera, I suspect I can't be that optimistic.

So second part of the question... what strategies do you employ to get your sites to play well with all browsers? (Do you develop for one then bugfix on the others, or try and learn all the quirks ahead of time, or just avoid anything risky?)
Didn't they re-launch last year? Something tells me things aren't too rosy in technorati land.
"Pets.com had a legitimate business model"

I beg to differ. A legit business model would include a base of customers who wanted to buy the products from the company -- something Pets never had luck with.

"What they did fail to do was exercise discretion with their spending."

That was one of their failures, but not their biggest. The biggest was not having demand, and being unable to create demand. It was easier for people to go to the grocery store once per month than to order online. Comparing Pets to Amazon isn't really valid, since Amazon meant to a seller of everything, and even when they were solely selling books, there was more value-add than Pets could ever achieve. You can shop for books on Amazon in more interesting ways than you can at a physical bookstore. That wasn't true for Pets.com.

"And as for Facebook, gee, a supposed 15 billion dollar valuation? Advertising models that's outright creepy? That's growth?"

$15 billion sounds ridiculous, sure, and it probably is. But that doesn't make a tech bubble. That's just over-valuation. Facebook isn't a public company, and if it went under, a handful of investors would lose money. Not the same as the NASDAQ going from $5000 to <$2000.
Google opens up Gmail IM chat to AOL
My thoughts exactly. Anyone who thinks were in a tech bubble doesn't understand what those words mean. We are not in a stock market bubble. And a stock market bubble was what burst in 2000. The downturn in the economy was not caused by small startups failing, but by new, swollen public companies shutting their doors.

If Facebook, Meebo, Bebo, Plentyoffish, iminlikewithyou, justin.tv, reddit, digg, Pandora, Last.fm, Hotornot, TechCrunch, PodShow, Boing Boing, Life Hacker, Prosper.com, 43 Things, SixApart, Gawker Media, 37 Signals, Wordpress.com, Scribd, and Zimbra all went out of business tomorrow, simultaneously, we would not see the huge rash of pink slips we saw in 2000. The stock market would not crash because of it.

It's not the same at all. Funny names != a bubble, and neither do over-valuations by private investors, and neither does a lot of entrepreneurs trying to start companies. It's called capitalism. Get used to it.
Ab, vg cebirf gung bhg bs 2A-1 cbvagf ba n fcurer, A+2 jvyy funer n urzvfcurer.
Receiver's Reputation:  A clever way to detect spam?
Ab ohg vg pna or hfrq gb cebir gung sbe sbhe cbvagf ba n pvepyr, guerr bs gurfr cbvagf zhfg or va gur fnzr frzvpvepyr.

Zl uhapu vf gung sbe rnpu qvzrafvba lbh nqq, lbh pna vapernfr a ol bar, gung vf gb fnl lbh pbhyq unir 6 cbvagf va gur 4 qvzrafvba. Guvf vf onfrq ba gur vqrn gung vg gnxrf a cbvagf gb znxr na a qvzrafvbany cynar, fb lbh pna cynpr 4 cbvagf va gur pragre sbe gur frzvsvther va gur 4gu qvzrafvba.

Gura vg vf snveyl fvzcyr gb ernyvfr gung cynpvat 2a+1 vgrzf vagb 2 tebhcf zrnaf gung ng yrnfg bar tebhc zhfg unir ng yrnfg a+1 vgrzf.

Gb hfr guvf onfvf sbe gur agu qvzrafvba, lbh zhfg erzbir a cbvagf yrnivat bayl 3 cbvagf.
Vs nalobql pna znxr n cebbs guvf gubhtu V jbhyq ybir gb frr vg.
Verizon Embraces Google's Android
Godel Escher Bach - non fiction

The Tomorrow File - fiction. Written in the 1970s as the author's only foray into science fiction. Seriously, it's that good.
I think that's just a cliche and reality proves the opposite. A lot of acquisitions are going on constantly in all industries, and there is no or very little correlation between that and sales.
There's a huge difference between the current growth in the tech sector (which involves a lot of ideas that are likely to fail) and the two recent bubbles of my lifetime (dotcom and real estate, which are somewhat conflated in that video as well). The main difference is rampant speculation with people making tons of money on transactions way above reasonable market value. Real estate and dotcom were characterized by a kind of mania. Large, risky investments based primarily on the logic that values are surging and will keep surging fueled the inflated valuations. When it's just Google, Microsoft, etc. making strategic acquisitions there's much less cause for alarm. If there's a tech bubble, it's either surrounded by a thick layer of substance or it's dozens of tiny little insignificant bubbles that will burst before causing anyone any harm.

Facebook and a dozen imitators going public with their stock prices subsequently soaring out of control as people rush to get in on the action, that would be cause for alarm.

Time Magazine covers are the wrong place to look for bubble clues.
Facebook's early growth was based in large part on tactical open-ups of the service. They started with just Harvard (where I'd say the "who's got the most friends?" game kicked things off), expanded to the Ivies and then elite non-Ivies (who desperately want to be like Harvard) and slowly, slowly worked their way down the college eliteness scale, adding similar types of schools at the same time (northeastern LAC's in one clump, west coast state schools in another, etc). Schools who weren't added yet wanted to be in the elite club, and schools that were already in were too busy editing other people's wall posts to notice the elite factor of the site diminishing. Eventually they opened it up to all colleges, but that was probably well after they had opened it up to the colleges that actually mattered, numbers wise. The college growth sorta has buttressed the rest of the growth, since it pulls in new users as they go to college and retains old users as they graduate.

Meanwhile, the site's features progressed along, making the site increasingly sticky (it really wasn't back in the day). The big hitters were and still are Photos and Events, which both happen a lot better if all of your friends are already signed up for the site.

All of this stuff happened well before there was a lot of hype from the Valley started kicking in. Facebook's growth since opening up to high school (and later, the world) is less interesting though, since they've basically been running on network effects, inherent virality and quality product. They didn't have any of those when the site first started.
Phenomenology of Spirit - G.W.F. Hegel
The No Asshole Rule - Why Jerks Employees May Cost Your Co $160K/yr
OO seen as 'higher level static typing'
Ask YC: How do you handle security?
I have a site with the usual username/password login hooked to a MySQL backend. What's the best way to handle signup (sending the username/password) and logging in (same)? In particular, can you avoid using a POST and sending text parameters?
- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP)

- Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (PAIP)

- Godel Escher Bach (GEB)

- All books from Gibson, Asimov, Sterlig, Huxley and Douglas Adams
"The best is yet to come, as Advertising rates will increase and I think Microsoft will become a leader in the space as they are innovating and Brian McAndrews who leads the Advertiser and Publisher Solutions seems to know what he is talking about."

That is simply laughable. Ask anyone who has used msn adcenter vs google adwords. Microsoft have absolutely no clue whatsoever IMHO.