skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know. To quote myself:

Maybe something was lost in the translation from reportee [ie Bill] to reporter
I would argue that it is perhaps the most important quality of all.

Always remember that this is someone you are _starting a business with_. Anything less than true friendship is likely to cause grief later on when the going gets tough.
oh, microsoft very much did change direction for the internet. i'm sure the company's first response, right down to the core of its being, was to try to ignore the internet out of existence. "so people want to get online now? fine, let them sign up for msn." i'm sure that's what billg wanted to do as well, in his heart of hearts. but he was smart enough to know that it was a battle that microsoft was going to lose, monopoly power or no.

who remembers trying to get on the internet with win3.1? it was abysmal. it had either horrible tcp/ip support or none at all, i can't remember which. everybody i knew bought trumpet winsock. all microsoft would have had to do, to follow its usual modus operandi, would be to go on pretending that the internet didn't matter. but then win95 came out, and it's tcp/ip support was outstanding. it was actually easier to set up than the unixes of the day. and its various office apps gained the ability to export to html, amongst other internet-friendly advances.

yes, internet explorer is stagnant now, because it no longer serves any purpose for ms to improve it. netscape is already dead, after all.
What are examples of socially acceptable lies?  (e.g., psychology experiment, surprise party, etc.)
One of the mysteries of the universe is that it speaks the language of mathematics in 248 dimensions
Well, that's by far the most interesting response I've seen. may I quote you?
Mark Cuban profits from file sharing, then calls for ban
There are very few companies like that - the names i can come up with are less than the number of fingers that i have...
Nothing Matters More than The Market
The denial of death.
Remember the blub vs better languages debates? Chalk one up for better languages, where you get more done with LESS people. Have fun trying to hire java engineers in the valley right now :)
:) There's something to this. When you have to read your own code a lot of it lingers still, so it's often easier to hold in your head. Importing other people's code into your head is usually more effort, proportional at least to project size regardless of how well-written it is.
Try rewriting more often :) Rewriting is a form of active reading, and I find active reading helps in comprehending code just like any writing. A lot of the benefits of the whole XP/refactoring movement may come from just this phenomenon, that writing code helps swap a program into one's head more effectively than just reading code.
Don't worry so much about how you or others will modify it, and how it may look when it's 10 times hairier. That's what refactoring is for.
Ah. Didn't read this when I replied earlier: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=83107

You make sense. However, I would just try to find more interesting work than cleaning up after others and then trying to get them to change in a certain way :)
One very useful idiom:

while(readLine()) { process lines... }

where readLine() encapsulates the repetition and returns eof as well.
Well, the problem with all digg-gaming schemes that I have heard about is that someone usually rats everyone out to Digg and then everyone gets banned.
Virility != virulence.

Virility is manliness. Virulence is the quality of being viral.

I was wondering what the hell made an app 'manly' for a bit there.
If You P2P Download In France: No Internet For You
The goal is to conceptualize the problem in such simple terms that even a machine could solve it. Then do so.
That's a good point.

Perhaps you don't have to live with this, though. I've been carrying this half-baked idea for a while: If small teams are so key it's worth trying to be really creative to retain them, by trying various refactorings on team organization.

You still have the problem of incenting high-quality workers, though. Which brings us back to startups.
Heh... they're streaming music from YouTube videos. It sounds like crap unfortunately.
How about us Ubuntu users? don't we count for anything these days? :-)
http://www.classicalarchives.com

Huge repository of midi files that has been extended to include a variety of live recordings. Quasi-free (like 5 files per month), and a $25/yr subscription gives access to pretty much everything. No advertisements at all (not counting self-promotion).
Viruses still overwhelmingly target windows, and though this is not related to the technical design of the OS, every manufacturer had their own crudded-up installation helped give windows a bad rep (re: popups).
I'm interested in your unfinished solution; you have any thing about it online?
You give the impression that it's impossible to fire someone in Canada. It's not. Even if someone is actually fired because they are alcoholic or older or pregnant, it's very hard to prove, whether it's against the law or not.
Protecting IM From Big Brother
Ian Goldberg, leading security researcher, professor at the University of Waterloo, and co-creator of the Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR) protocol recently gave a talk on protecting your IM conversations. He discusses OTR and its importance in today's world of warrant-less wire tapping. OTR users benefit from being able to have truly private conversations over IM by using encryption to obtain authentication, deniability, and perfect forward secrecy, while working within their existing IM infrastructure. With the recent NSA wiretapping activities and increasing Big Brother presence, security and OTR are increasingly important.
So true. Even though I use Linux myself (since I prefer it's flexibility and openness), I usually recommend a Mac to non-hackers who ask me for a recommendation on a new computer.
Ian Goldberg, leading security researcher, professor at the University of Waterloo, and co-creator of the Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR) protocol recently gave a talk on protecting your IM conversations. He discusses OTR and its importance in today's world of warrant-less wire tapping. OTR users benefit from being able to have truly private conversations over IM by using encryption to obtain authentication, deniability, and perfect forward secrecy, while working within their existing IM infrastructure. With the recent NSA wiretapping activities and increasing Big Brother presence, security and OTR are increasingly important.
Isn't EVERYONE very upset that we need these types of applications these days? Why does it seem reasonable that EVERYONE needs to hide their communications from their own governments? Shouldn't we be more upset that things have gotten so out of hand?
What you describe is Microsoft doing the absolute least they could do to accommodate their users who wanted to get online. Things like making the technology a little easier or having Word export to HTML -- I don't consider this "embracing the internet". I don't see how these can be considered as changing the direction of the company. The direction of Microsoft was not changed at all. Their cash cows were the Windows OS and the Office Application Suite before the internet got big, and those products were still the main focus and direction of Microsoft afterward.
1) Keep it pervasive across all generations - every kid who enters high school or college gets a facebook account

2) Make sure facebook remains a necessary tool for social interaction

3) Cultivate the app platform, and make sure there is incentive to develop applications
The security hole I was thinking of is this: it would give an incentive for digg-spammers to set up accounts on news.yc!
I think encryption in communications should be the default. The best way to discourage people from snooping is to make it incredibly difficult by default. Then, in all likelihood, time will be spent spying on the most useful targets, rather than the easiest en masse in the hopes of blind luck.
eMusic, of course. It rules. Cheap and all the best current bands (if your favorite band is not included, perhaps it's time to re-assess your taste in music).
I think you are right and that OTR, and other encryption programs like it, could receive a substantial boost in usage if we could get popular distributions like Ubuntu to include and enable them by default. I think the classic quoted example is that of organ downer opt-in (in the us being 20%) and in some other country where it is opt-out it is around 80%.
oh yes, Microsoft Office
Let the best bubble up - power of reddit
Boo. I did this as an undergrad project FOUR YEARS AGO.
The number one sign you're a crappy programmer:

1. You foist idiocy upon others and refuse to listen when they point it out as such, because someone told you that the idiocy was "effective established principles".

Your "effective established principles" seem to be neither effective, nor established, nor principled.
The main reason to build outside of silicon valley-- less people poaching your employees, yes, but more importantly: You don't have the bad advice constantly being forced on you.

in SV, its like being in a bar full of hot chicks who are constantly coming on to you, and telling you that they will sleep with you, if only you'll get a vasectamy, shave your ballsack, take female hormones, grow your hair out, start dressing in womens clothes, etc-- where each time you do something to please one of them they have another suggestion and two more show up with completely different suggestions. You can never make them happy and none of them will sleep with you, until you have proven yourself to be completely desperate, and wrapped around your finger. So you ultimately end up with an ugly one after being teased by hot chicks to the point of total desperation. Then when they do sleep with you, you find out they have herpes, and a few days later, they start sleeping with your best friend instead and tell you that you have to stop going to bars, or they will make sure you never get laid again.

In the end you're screwed, diseased and have wasted several years trying to get laid when you should have been trying to build your business.

Only, when I talk about women here I'm talking about VCs and when I talk about changing you I'm talking about really bad business advice. You're left with the choice of running your company into the ground based on their bad advice, or being pushed out of your own company because you wouldn't destroy it for them. No VC realizes that they are incompetent at business and giving their clients bad advice-- the best you can hope for is one that is so busy they aren't paying attention to you. People say you just need to find a good VC-- but the reality is, VCs are like politicians: there are no good ones. If they were decent people they wouldn't be in that line of work. (Not that there's anything wrong with venture investing, just the way its practiced in Silicon Valley is death to high tech startups.)

Unless you're a MBA with a marketing focus and cant' write code to save your life, and your only way to make it big is to latch onto some actually talented people and od the high burn rate high profile startup thing-- the Valley is the last place you want to go.
> they were slower than using a for loop. Since then I haven't used any sort of recursion in C or C++.

That's premature optimization.
Why to startup? Why not?
To startup or not to startup? Why?
"Nearly everything is a hash... everything else is an Object"

Huh? Objects are basically hash tables/associative arrays in JavaScript...
Do you know what the export restrictions would be like on software that was actually secure? Needless to say, Mr Gates wouldn't have been allowed to sell all his wares to China.
I agree with comments from other posters. The only two things that I would add are that ...

1) you don't need to like someone to work with them in a startup.

In fact, it is very important that you surround yourself with people who have complementary skills and have different lifetime experience and perspective. As a result, it is difficult to truly like someone who is that different.

But you must respect someone in order to work with them in a startup.

2) Trust is very important.

But trust has a different meaning in a startup. Imagine yourself having to jump off a baloney and one of your co-founders is the one who needs to catch you to save your life. In this case, trust means trusting their ability to catch you and their assessment of their ability to catch you. So if you ask "can you catch me?" and they say "yes" but in reality they can't, then you would rather that they say "no". That way, at least you would try to find alternative.
I don't think it's true that Canadians move to the States "very reluctantly". For most of my lifetime, it's been a given that the top Canadian talent in any field would eventually move to the States, or spend significant time there.

I would bet that most Canadians, even those working in the USA, feel that the USA is a bit messed up on some issues and has an arguably lower quality of life. But it's got an economy that's an order of magnitude bigger and opportunities to match.
Aie! Attack of the floaty yinyang troupe!
40% of the Web sites on the Internet run on Microsoft's IIS, according to Netcraft...
I was curious what his background was too. Turns out he's a 31 year old Wall Street analyst. Take from that what you will.

I wouldn't call the Mac interface retardedly simple, I'd call it intelligently simple--ever heard of Fitts' Law? or done anything in HCI?
It's really a double edged sword with some unintended consequences. Italy has similar (probably stronger) laws. One of the results is that most employers are very, very wary of hiring women of childbearing age.
I think I can boil it down to one sentence:

In quality code, the cost of changing the code grows more slowly than the benefits.

Everything else flows from this: functionality, readability, clean design, appropriate technology to problem, appropriate effort spent on problem, availability of programmers who can work on such a system, management of legacy features, and foresight of problems and opportunities in the future. Lame 10-line bash scripts that even repeat a few lines can be quality code. And so can entire application frameworks coded in C++.

The Agile people might say that the cost should instead be proportional. They would argue that if extension of the system is too easy, you probably overspent on the initial quality. But I feel in my bones that this is wrong. We should really be aiming for a polynomial or exponential ratio of benefits to cost.
I think there should be an option to down-vote stuff like this.
Asking others for reasons/motivation to pursue a startup won't do you any good if you can't find those same things from within.

Reasons for me: The experience and thrill. Knowing that you can create something of your own from scratch, nurture it, and watch it grow, possibly yielding huge results.

I'm not sure if you're looking for any 'secrets' or what have you. The benefits/disadvantages seem pretty obvious.
I would be game, but I don't really have useful sites to submit at the moment. One is in german, and the other contains erotica, which are forbidden on digg.

Anyway, I don't think it would even have to be illegal gaming of the system. We could watch each others submissions and if we like them, vote them up.
yes, that would also be bad
PCs punt and leave you with all the choices to make, both hardware and software-wise. Windows doesn't come with anything for hackers out of the box. If you don't want to go through that, PCs will be very depressing. If you're willing to sit down and spend 1-8 hours tweaking and installing things the way you like it, you can have a very productive development machine on your hands, it just won't be a Unix-like one.

On the other hand, getting Xcode requires you to be involved with a stupid Apple Developer Connection program, and you don't get automatic package management like in Linux.

I just built a new PC dual booting Windows and Linux and I'm loving the hell out of it, personally; I can get performance and screen real estate that's a significant fraction of a $4500 Mac Pro system at a fraction of the price; $1500 will get you dual 22" monitors, a quad-core Intel Core 2 processor, 2 GB of fast RAM, a 320 GB SATA hard drive, and a very nice video card that's adequate for semi-serious gaming. I can be highly productive as a developer, reboot, play games for a little while to blow off steam, and then go back to my distraction-free development environment. Linux for productivity, Windows for timesinks.
how do you get a significant number of "friends" on those networks who are willing to watch/read your spam?

One method I've seen work pretty well is to hire people to actually establish semi-legitimate personas on open social networks like MySpace and Hi5. Pay high school girls $10/hr or so to make thousands of friends and you've established a base for some viral marketing.
It's technically a "row house" but it's not really on the row. It's up on the hill next to 680, kappa sig, and theta delt.
Facebook rolls out voting for news feed items
Maybe it's been there for a couple days but this is the first time I've noticed it. It seems cool, but it makes the news feed look even more cluttered and I worry about what they'll do with my data--will one of my friends find out that I voted their story down?

Unfortunately there's no "vote down" button for the ads... you can downvote Facebook Pages news items though.
It doesn't really bother me, but my news feed is already pretty relevant because I adjusted http://pitt.facebook.com/feed_prefs.php. I have a feeling that most people have never clicked on the "Preferences" button at the top of the news feed.
SICP code is not meant to be practical, and to me practicality should be a component of quality.

SICP does teach you about elegance and introduces a wide variety of programming concepts. I guess these are valuable in the quest for "quality".
Why I Program In Ruby (And Maybe Why You Shouldn't)
Just like certain hot women.
You are aware of the origin of the phrase "insanely great", right?
I don't work there any more, but you are correct. Many successful products started with banked 20% time.

However, most individual 20% projects are not standalone projects. They are often tools or components or features or mini-sabbaticals with other teams.

It is more possible to entrepreneurial at Google than any other company I know of. The workload is really high, but even so, the main barrier to effective 20% time is still oneself. Even at Google, most people talk about their brilliant ideas and don't do anything about them.
In Canada, on p2p networks (excepting bittorrent), free with the purchase of blank audio media.
Oddly, to "jump off a baloney" seems to somehow more accurately represent the startup process than jumping off a balcony, which you possibly meant to type. (Oddly similar to "living on a smile and a shoeshine", as well.)
The employee retention argument is a misleading one. It only matters if you make it past earlier and much higher hurdles, like creating something novel that users like, and getting funded.

Someone who wants to start a startup and avoids SV because it will be harder to retain employees is like someone who wants to become a movie star and avoids LA because the higher crime rate means he'll have to worry about people breaking into his mansion after he succeeds.
EU May Crack Down On Targeted Advertising
That's not what I said. If you fire someone, you need to pay severance. Severance is set by statute and case law, and is more - sometimes significantly more - than American employers are used to. If any of the other conditions or circumstnaces are also part of the situation, you could be paying damages, too.
I recently bought an iMac as an nth house machine. The software experience is very pleasant; the mouse and keyboard are terrible, but very pretty.

I was thinking it might be nice to switch to a Mac as my main computer. I already have a nice dual monitor setup and a nice keyboard, so I would want a standalone Mac box. I checked out the price of the only Mac which makes sense to use with external monitors - $2500 for the Mac Pro!! I was surprised - especially since the iMac seemed somewhat reasonably priced.
Very unusual analogy. I assume its first or second hand.
How do you distinguish the good VCs from the bad?
where is the line (to be processed) stored?
Ask PG : The difference between Clients, Customers, Consumers and Users
Hello,

This is a question I wish I will be able to ask to PG in person as he will be in London UK on 4th Dec.

Dear PG,
you wrote many time about philosophy and the importance of the meaning of words.
Also I would like to hear your point of view about the differences between Clients, Customers, Consumers and Users?

We can already find some responses already through your essays. But I think it would be nice that you re-explore those fundamental concepts because you're inspiring so many people to create startups and therefore not being employed.

I wish you a nice trip to London.

Thibault B.
read this and then decide for yourself.

http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/d...
Forgotten your password? Google can find it for you. Unfortunately.
Django: Customizing NewForms
A Simple Probability Puzzle (or why humans suck at assessing probabilities)
Taking Science on Faith
Pressure from investors to do stupid things is a real problem, but it's actually less of a problem in SV than anywhere else.

You need roughly as much money to do a given startup outside the valley as in it. That means you're roughly as beholden to investors no matter where you are. And stupid as many SV investors are, they are on average smarter than those outside it.
What happened to Pair Programming? A few years ago, a lot of start-ups I met were trying it.
Publisher Gets Web Readers to Fill the Pages of Its Magazines
I don't have an answer for you, but I have some variables you might consider:

1) how fast are you growing?

2) how fat is your profit margin?

3) what is the ratio of usage to capacity? peak usage? sustained usage?

4) how quickly and automatedly can you add servers?

5) looking at (3) and (4), what happens WHEN a server dies? can the rest of the servers cope with the load? do you have automatic failover? do you have any single point(s) of failure?

6) how much developer time are you willing to put into things like adding aggressive caching and fixing performance bottlenecks?

For the technical side of things, make sure you've read "Building Scalable Web Sites", by Cal Henderson. It will help you spend your resources much more effectively.
Web Research Drives More Real-World Purchases
I live in Northeast Ohio. My major concern is that if I try to shop around my business plan in my area, investors won't understand half of what I'm talking about. I'm not speaking from experience, mind you, but the area is not exactly a powerhouse for Internet companies. The VC firms around here are attenuated towards other industries, like biotechnology and polymers. I'm pretty sure it would be tough to convince them to invest in a 25 year old's web startup when they're used to investing in companies that have patent-protected manufacturing processes and $10 million in sales.
Minimum Startup Overhead: Coffee Shop Programmer
I wrote a lexer/compiler for hypernumbers.com on my own and it came out a 2-pass

Then I remembered Conway's Law :(
"His work, which has been posted on the internet, has not yet been accepted for publication in any journal"

It should raise alarm bells when newspapers and magazines are discussing science before it's been through peer review. I'll wait until a journal picks this up before I get excited!