skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was expecting something more interesting than what this article covered. It's for corporate drones, I'm afraid.

If you're starting a company, you'll eventually (inshallah) get to the point where you can't spend the time to interview everyone anymore. And you'll have to rely upon the judgment of your hires, who may or may not have ever interviewed anyone before. I've been there and done that and here are my observations, take them for what they are worth.

To keep your n00b employees from eagerly hiring the first moron that walks in the door -- remind them that they are, with each and every hire, determining the future of the company. Do they want their company to be average, stocked with average people, with an average chance of success in a ruthless, winner-take-all market? Or would they prefer to work with smart, capable people who can adapt to an ever-changing marketplace of tasks and ideas, who care more about the daily challenge of doing something that few if any others are doing Exactly Right, and who view the Big Payday as a potential bonus for excellent execution and the blessing of a fickle market?

I watched some new-ish Google employees start down the former road, eager to defuse an ever-increasing workload (they were outside of engineering proper and had no ready list of questions or expectations to refer to). Once the matter was crystallized per above -- do you want to work with money-grubbing robots, or do you want to keep this company at a standard higher than most on the planet?! -- I noticed a distinct change in the interviews and votes. Once upon a time I was willing to accept average people. Then one day, as the startup I worked for was considering whether we could afford to hire a desperately needed cameraman, it dawned on me that for a small company, literally every employee must be better than their counterparts at established corporations, or your equity is that much more likely to become worthless. Is that what you worked your ass off and sacrificed some of your life to accept?

It's so easy to give in to mediocrity -- and it's deadly, because once it sneaks in, it's really hard to exterminate. Hire people who are smarter than you, if you possibly can. Hire people who you'd like to ask hard, probing questions to which you (or anyone) may not know the answers. And only ever hire people who you absolutely NEED, where you are forced to think -- is this person the one who's going to make the Specific Problems for which we're burning our hard-earned cash go away? And the next round of problems, and the next?

Every time you hire someone you are spending your precious time and deciding whether to spend your precious cash, so you better goddamn well get it right. Startups can't afford to make mistakes -- this article is simply rehashing that point, for corporate chumps who haven't Got It.
This heretic has besmirched our beloved PG - seize him! Silence the blasphemer at once!
Risk isn't linear in miles driven.
If you don't have a tight budget, I would suggest: airbagindustries.com, happycog.com, blueflavor.com or 31three.com - they are all well known designers / design studios and do great work.

If you're looking for "cheap" work, you could visit FreelanceSwitch.com and post on their job board or get involved in their forum and try to find someone that way. Also SitePoint.com allows you to hold contests to pick the best work, though most good graphic designers stay away from the contests because it is considered unprofessional to submit work on spec.
The work on general-purpose computing with GPUs (e.g., protein folding) has only begun. This article is either trolling or shortsighted.

It's like looking at the web in 1995 and saying it's dying because there are only so many pages you can fit on a "what's new" page (at one point there were so few webpages that you could list all of them on one page).

GPUs are very exciting and a major reason why desktop computing will continue to matter outside of business applications.
Evaluating New Product Ideas (focus on Tractability)
I've used this guy for logo/icon stuff: http://www.iconiza.com/ Don't be put off by the fact that he lives in Ecuador; check out his portfolio. He's inexpensive and responsive.
This is not a LinkedIn killer.

As an example:

Facebook's job search feature is a joke - it's just a section of the "Marketplace" and is filled with the typical "Make money from home" ads.

LinkedIn solves legitimate problems business people have with Facebook and other social networking services.
I didn't realize you worked at the same place I did. Are you the guy in the blue shirt I said hi to in the break room?
I just posted a blog post about this-- in response to a fellow YC Winter 08 founder asking about design resources on the cheap...

http://www.tonywright.com/2007/bootstrap-design-for-geek-pow...

That's for tight budgets only-- if you've got a budget, find a usability/UI god and pay what they are worth. :-)
"That means that your opponent is likely to choose paper, because they will expect to you to start the game with stone."

So because stone is the most likely move, paper is the most likely move? Funky logic...
I'm skeptical.

Let's have these touchy-feely visual learner team player super duper people learn about continuations in Scheme, monads in Haskell, the massive libraries in .NET/Java EE, or something else that poses a formidable challenge. Let's see them visually learn their way around that stuff. Then you can call me a loser.
A lot of people, myself inlcuded, want to shun Groovy because it lives in Java land. We are bitter people.
AskYC: Quick GUI app in off-beat language?  Or...?
I want to make a desktop app with a GUI. I don't have loads of free time and I don't want to have to beg too much help off of "real" developers on forums or whatever. I want to do my on work and live with the consequences of my descisions and not send every little thing to a committee. My app needs mostly to put bitmap images on the form and rotate them around and/or stretch them to fit rectangular coordinates. My app will have a DSL that's mostly just a wrapper for the object model.

I can code C# applications, deploy them, etc. no problem. With C# I can just code without thinking. I have proof-of-concept code that runs and I can just focus on making a working application. This makes C# the default choice even though I can think of dozens of reasons not to go with it.

I wish there was a journeyman developer that could just take an hour or so to give me a tour of his alternative platform and show me what to focus on and what to ignore.

I'd seriously like to try Common Lisp, Scheme, or Ruby... but I dread the learning curve for all the dipstick stuff like buttons and dropdown menus and windowing crap-- and setting up the environment and making deployment exe files or whatever. And I'm running on a #^&$#( Windows box, so I also dread getting half my documentation for tool x being only in Linuxese and having to figure out yet more crap just to get up to speed.

I'm a true believer and all... but getting a functioning application now is more important than being idealogically correct. All other things being equal I'd just figure everything out no matter how long it takes, but I'm losing patience.

Is there a good alternative to C#, or do I just need to accept that doing something off beat isn't feasable for me yet and just get on with it?
JavaScript Tricks: 3D Panorama
I'd seriously like to try Common Lisp

If so, take a look at Cells-GTK, since it makes the GUI stuff simple, and is cross-platform:

http://common-lisp.net/project/cells-gtk/
Ask YC: Good place to play chess online
I want to play chess with a family member over the internet. Can anyone recommend a simple place that allows me to do that? Preferably without registration.
The bad news is that currently available meds are only mildly effective, and by "effective" I mean effective in prolonging disease progression.

The good news is that there is a ton of research being done (I work in this area). Some people are a bit squeamish about getting involved in clinical trials, but if I were in your position, you can bet I would enroll my parent in a trial. The best resource for finding what's enrolling in your area is www.clinicaltrials.gov.

Elan is about to start a phase III trial on their Alzheimer's vaccine, Bapineuzumab, and it has generated quite a bit of buzz.

http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSL2153046720070...

As I said, I work in this area and obviously carry a bias. However, I did not see anyone else suggest the possibility of clinical trials, so I thought I should throw it out there to consider among the other options.
Highly recommended piece from a guy who's been in the trenches.
sound. byte. heaven.

some choice clips:

"The lesson you eventually learn is that code always changes, always always always, and as soon as you have to change the same thing in N places, where N is more than 1, you'll have earned your scar."

"The other seminal industry book in software design was Design Patterns, which left a mark the width of a two-by-four on the faces of every programmer in the world, assuming the world contains only Java and C++ programmers, which they often do."

" 'It's not that Java is verbose!' he added."

"An 'X programmer', for any value of X, is a weak player."

"I can't exactly wish for something painful to happen to Java developers, since hey, it's already happening; they've already taught themselves to pretend it's not hurting them."
why don't you do it in C# uaing Mono.net

or you could use something leftfield like the torquex game engine...
Tcl & Tk sound like something that might work, even if they're not as 'cool' as some languages. You can get something simple up and running very quickly. ... However... for the heavy lifting bits, you might have to write some C code.
One thing going for digg that myspace doesn't have is the huge number of RSS subscribers. Digg can potentially introduce ads in their feeds.
It's not so unusually to re-use full land fills here in Germany.
The article says that it will be cheaper than coal. That should be quite possible. Not that the energy will be free.
This is any startup's best kept secret -- Good (and affordable) designers are worth their weight in gold.
In case it isn't obvious, this is mostly about my site. I implemented it in Kawa Scheme.
"Nobody Cares What Your Code Looks Like"

That's what all the lazy programmers say.
Have you thought about IronPython, or one of the other "off beat" languages that run on .NET? If you already know C#, my guess is you probably know the .NET windowing libraries and perhaps are familiar with WPF. If you know those, you can pretty easily experiment with another language that's more expressive than C#, but still use the libraries you know.

I'm not sure of the state of any of the other languages, but IronPython seems to be at a decent maturity level, and it's .NET implementation is actually faster than CPython in some cases. There's also IronRuby, but that project is still pretty green. You also have languages like L# (.NET implementation of Lisp) S# (same, but smalltalk) and F# (.NET ML) that are in various stages of readiness. I've heard rumors that MSFT wants to make F# a full fledged citizen of the .NET landscape. We'll see.

I've also messed around with the new PowerShell scripting language. It's actually possible to access the WPF libraries from a shell script in Windows. That's kind of cool. I was considering making a Windows app based on PowerShell for a while there, so I looked into it for a few months.
logo work, i suggest logosauce.com
I'm impressed with javascript. I think it's a good bridge between the LISP/SCHEME crowd and the C/JAVA curly bracket crowd. I'm really rooting for it.
Going Public Caps Dream for a Maker of Software
It's easy in Ruby. For example:

require 'tk'
root=TkRoot.new{title "curi"}
label = TkLabel.new(root) {text "i'm text"}.pack
button = TkButton.new(root) {text "click me"}.pack
Tk.mainloop
What else are they used for?
A rather silly post especially since it only talks about one side of the coin. Obviously customers don't care what your code looks like. That does not mean you shouldn't care about it - especially startups - since ugly, fragile code can completely change the rate of evolution of the product.
My Boss (Executive VP) is on LinkedIn.

His Kid (15 year old daughter) is apparently on Facebook.

Sounds to me like it's two different worlds. I highly doubt I'll be seeing my 50-some year old boss on Facebook giving me Vampire bites any time soon.
How Frank Schilling Won the Domain Race After Starting at the Back of the Pack
New Gizmo Makes Ears "Talk" Into Mobile Phones
A new mobile phone headset goes in one ear and not only delivers sound from callers on the other end of the line, but picks up users' voices as well, cutting out ambient noise in the process.
No, the lazy programmers say: "I might as well refactor this to be pretty because it will take less effort down the road. It's better to work a bit harder now to tackle a problem I can't avoid than work a lot harder later to tackle a worse problem I could have avoided."
The Web Celeb 25
Tk has bindings to other languages as well, you don't have to use Tcl: http://wiki.tcl.tk/17264
Stevey had a series of articles where he implemented Sokoban in a bunch of JVM languages, and Groovy did very poorly. I can't find a live version of the article, but here's archive.org's copy:

http://web.archive.org/web/20060720091555/www.cabochon.com/~...

Groovy just seems pointless to me. It's taken too long to get anywhere, and I can't think any reason to use it over JRuby, Rhino or Scala. JRuby and Rhino have the benefit of being implementations of popular languages, basically getting years of experience, tooling, docs and code for free. Scala adds novel ideas not found in other JVM languages, and makes certain types of problems much easier than they would otherwise be. Groovy is a less powerful version of Ruby with a Java like syntax. It's awfully hard to get excited about that.
I reread this at least 5 times to make sure I wasn't missing something, but what about WinForms? If you code a lot of C#, I assume you have Visual Studio, and if you need it now, wouldn't it be better to save the language learning exploration for a different, less urgent project? You could probably have a winforms app running in less time than it takes to order a pizza.

As I'm writing this comment, I keep looking back at the original to see if there was some requirement that it be cross-platform or something.
Helping UK startups get ahead in San Francisco and Silicon Valley
I woke up at 4am this morning for no reason and decided to go through it. I thought it was pretty clear. As an aside, from purely a learning experience, it was kinda fun and eye opening. At least I can see why geeks think it's neat.

Anyway, the namespace clash is reduced with a ycombinator because you'd only have to declare it once. Here, it seems like there's not much of a gain because we only used it on hash. But if you wanted to use the same trick on array, or other containers, you'd essentially be not only duplicating code, but also taking up namespace with a make_array, or make_othercontainer. In addition, any time you wanted recursion, you'd be able to use it.

If I had to take a stab at it, ycombo is a way to implement recursion mechanism when the language doesn't provide named recursion, loops, or iterators, and all you get are first-class functions and a few substitution rules.

As for (a), It seems pretty inane to use ycombo given that modern high level languages provide named recursions, loops, and iterators. But what if you don't get those things? Generally, you'd have to make your own recursion mechanism.

When would you ever have languages that don't have those things? Probably not often. But Forth comes to mind. I've never used Forth, but from what little I know about it, the language starts off with some basic primitives and that's it. No loops, no if statements. How do you get anything done? Well, you build your own control structures. People use Forth because it's possible to build your own very small compiler from the ground up written in Forth itself, and still understand the entire thing. I suspect it's used in embedded programming because of that reason.

By that notion, I'm guessing you can physically build a lisp interpreter machine based on very few principles, like functions and substitution. Everything else can be derived in software, even things we think as basic, such as numbers and counting. Because of that, we can just build the basic axioms in hardware, and everything else can be built in software on top. That lowers the cost of your hardware if you can build it in fewer parts. ycombinator, in this case, would be a way to build recursion on a piece of hardware that only supports functions and substitution rules. With recursion, you can process lists of things, which means you can get stacks, and data structures, and rest of the wonderful world you're use to.

In any case, I figured PG and co. called it ycombinator because they hope that people they fund will in turn pay it forward and start other early stage funding companies. They're the first of many recursive calls to make_startup().
PG handles it well at least. I've met a lot of people who don't.
The controversial Bubble video has yet more controversy! Stolen!
More controversy the bubble video was remade from the ground up in less than 2 minutes flat! Beat that! Those guys who made version 1.0 and 1.1 are so Web1.0

Lane Hartwell eat your heart out.
The Richter Scales bloggers also eat your heart out. controversial

LOL
I just look at my watch and take the seconds mod 3. 0:rock, 1:paper, 2:scissors. Pretty sure random play (insofar as this method is random) is best.
I've written that app in Objective-C, which is pretty offbeat.
Reseller hosting options?
My company provides domains for some of our clients, which we pay for entirely.

We take care of the domain name purchasing, the design, the hosting; everthing. We're currently using Yahoo! Small Business to do this, which is very good. However, it turns out that you can only host a finite number of domains per user ID - They say it's for security purposes, but I'm not sure I believe that line...

Anyways, as a result we're looking for a host that provides an EASY reseller interface. Us technical folks don't usually get involved with the domain purchasing & provisioning since Yahoo does that part so well, and I'd like to keep it that way. I'm familiar with standard hosts like Rackspace & Mosso, but they don't appear to be terribly user friendly.

What I would like our business people to be able to do is:
1. Log in to the reseller management page.
2. Buy a domain name.
3. Have that domain name automatically provisioned and set up an FTP site with user and password so that we can pass those credentials off to our designer.

We never charge our customers for these domains, so that is not important.

These are all purely brochure-ware sites, with 1 php form that emails form results to our client. Any recommendations?
In the beginning was the flowchart. Software diagramming - a warning from history.
I've got a working prototype in C#-- gui and all; just no DSL, yet. I'd like to do go to a different language, but dread the learning curve and potential hassles of moving to something "cool" in the face of a time crunch.
The controversial Bubble video called 1.0 took months to make only to fall foul of controversy and a takedown as Lane Hartwell complained via her attorney that her photo (that she was already paid for) had not been credited. The Richter Scales bloggers then remixed into version web1.1 and this time went to great lengths to credit all the photos and remove that crappy Lane Hartwell photo with all its baggage.

But now to top the lot the new boys on the block have stolen the soundtrack and have recompiled the entire thing, in a web 2.0 application called Myplaylist that took them less than 2 minutes to make 'don't laugh' (you gotta just love Web2.0 gadgets) and are now being sued by every one under the planet for copyleft infringement, plagiarism, blasphemy, and sodomy.
There's smart lazy and then there's just lazy lazy. You must mean the former. I meant the latter.
Heck, I've never managed to get Eclipse to pull in and index even my 500,000-line code base, and I've spent weeks trying. It just falls over, paralyzed. It literally hangs forever

He probably just needs to disable automatic builds. There are other automatic features that can be disabled as well. Eclipse can be stripped down like anything else.

nothing that would permit the removal of the copy-and-paste duplication patterns that Java programmers think of as "inevitable boilerplate", but which are in fact easily factored out in dynamic languages.

You know, I've never heard the phrase "inevitable boilerplate" from a Java programmer, though his quotation marks suggest that he has. There are some things that can really be shrunk down in non-Java languages, but a lot of the examples that people point out are harmless:

System.out.println("output here");

or

for (Object obj : list)
{

}

These sorts of things don't really add to complexity. Too bad he didn't provide any specific examples of his own. Typically, when attacking Java (the most common sport in the software world today) people will pretend it has disabilities it doesn't have.

like non-broken closures, that the Java community is resisting tooth and nail

Another phenomenon I haven't seen too much of, I guess. Most resistence probably comes from people who know what will happen, rather than people who dislike the feature in and of itself...

I'll say this about Java, since I get the impression that a lot of ynews people are in college or just out of college: I've had gigantic mountains of Java code thrown at me that I could make useful modifications to in minutes. It is hard to obfuscate. By contrast, I have dealt with Javascript codebases that were a nightmare to work with simply because the previous guy thought it useful to graft functions onto objects (or is it "prototypes") at runtime. Nice feature, if you're not inheriting it...
So "JavaScript", which once had nothing at all to do with Java proper, may now be the best language to target the JVM. Oh the irony...
Sorry for the repost then, and thank you for the link!
IE 8 Passes Acid2 Test
When I took electricity and magnetism I was on the rocks at E school. I decided that rather than learn the material I would memorize problems to pass tests and save time. I ended up doing very well in the class but I didn't learn a thing. So a few months ago I started watching Lewin on iTunes U. He is everything that is right about a teacher. Passionate, engaged and focused on imparting the general concepts before the details. It's been a real (and free) pleasure watching him.
10-month-old startup raises $20 million to sell imaginary (sorry, virtual) goods
The takeaway here: hiring should not be based on rigid criteria.http://jobhacks.wordpress.com/2007/12/06/job-postings-are-de...
The advice regarding hiring for startups:
http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/how_to_hire_the.html
http://paulenglish.com/hiring.html
Developing apps for Google Android: it's a mixed bag
My eyes started glazing over when he started doing math. Did he calculate the amount of processing power for, say, a room sized, 6-sided monitor, or for a monitor with 1000s of layers in the Z-dimension? Because, it seems like those would take quite a bit of power...
"Entrepreneurs strike after negotiations break down with National Venture Capital Association"
Time's Person of the Year 2007:  Vladimir Putin
Yahoo Maps going from Flex 1.5 to AJAX
Squeak has the nicest, most intuitive GUI system. The language and the system is designed to be accessible to youngsters, yet it's more than powerful enough for Trevor Blackwell to recommend it. I'll quote him on good code bases that I know of include:

"Squeak, which is written in itself. It includes the complete source to its powerful GUI system, and is the only GUI toolkit I know of that is clean, readable, and hackable."