skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell you why I don't like syntax highlighting (or any crutch er,a helper). Ever since I read the chapter about Woz in Founders at Work. The thing that he thought made him so successful designing the Apple II: he knew every single little part of it intimately, like the back of his hand. That struck me like a lightning bolt. So that's how I feel about my code now.

If I want to do something, I read and reread and reread it over and over and over until I practically memorize it. THEN it's part of MY firmware, and that's when I really get insightful and productive. IDE's, syntax highlighting, etc. are just crutches that keep my real "hacking muscles" from developing. I won't use them. Black and green; that's all I know.

Similarly: I used to know every phone number I ever needed by heart until speed dial came out. One day last year, I had the very frightening experience of not being able to call a regular number from someone else's phone. I have never used speed dial since. Anything that impedes my "brain exercise" is something I do without.
I made the following comment over at reddit on this story; thought it might be of interest here:

As part of building the test suite for the POPFile project I built my code code coverage module that produced colored files (one per source file) indicating which lines had been exercised by the test suite and which had not.

Each line is colored green if the test suite executed it, red if not. Lines are numbered.

An example of this can be found here: http://popfile.sourceforge.net/Module.html

The code that does this is part of the POPFile project under the GPL.

John.
I have no idea what my wife's cell phone number is; I entered it in mu cell phone once and I just think of her as 2# :-)

John.
This guy recently broke down the schools which he thought offered good introductions to best pratices: http://blog.chapmanconsulting.ca/2007/09/27/Reviewing+Canadi...
Great post and I completely agree.

I am of the opinion that the ability to quickly make a decision and get everyone behind it is often more important than the decision itself. A "wrong" decision can be corrected if there is a concerted focus while even a "right" decision won't work if founders are hashing out an internal pecking order rather than implementation of said decision.
NASA Plans to Create Virtual World Around Lunar Exploration
I generally procrastinate because I simply don't want to do the task, not sure if that's the case for anyone else...
Crossing the Web 2.0 Chasm
It all depends on the "Mother". If she loves you sincerely she will support you and the kid will not even know if you were there or not. At the end they will all enjoy the success. Besides a kid can be a motivation to become even more succesful.
I find it ironic that people who create technology to automate tasks in the lives of others refuse to automate tasks in their own. I recall a group of folks who once refused to use looms because it wasn't as "pure"...

I find syntax highlighting very useful. In fact, I use as much as I can. I want to offload as many mental "maintenance" tasks to the computer as possible, so I can concentrate on the real problems.
"...but there's a set of photos on Flickr called "Dan Albritton's Secret Project."

http://www.flickr.com/photos/slavin_fpo/142487629/in/set-720...

Live action Mario. Anyone make anything of this?
When you create incentives, you always have to be careful to find out exactly what scenarios maximize the rewards of those incentives. These scenarios may be unexpected (Freakonomics touches on this alot). Creating incentives that are short term or simply give rewards in the face of egregious errors is why CEO compensation today is a scam. Many CEOs don't expect to be at a company longer than a few years, so their horizon for increasing the stock price is short term, often hurting the company in the longer term. You can see this when companies have firesales to save a quarterly result, only to hurt the next few quarters. With the alternative being three mediocre quarters with no rewards, in some incentive system it's better to artificially pump up one quarter and tank the next two quarters.

If stock options vested over a period of, say, 20 years, I wonder how the actions of CEOs would change? I'm not sure, but I think, on average, they would be vastly different than they are today.

I'm reminded of an article about Costco, where the CEO (who is an unusual type of CEO) said that Wall Street was clamoring for him to raise his profit margins and reduce the pay of his employees. He thought that this strategy would definitely raise revenues in the short term and destroy the company in the long term, by opening up an opportunity for a competitor.
I started to reply to this on Mike's website, but there was just too much to say. Check out this link where I, a parent, go through the same point-by-point competition:

http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/2007/11/09/re-29-years-old-...

"So for those keeping score, Mike went 6-1-1 (startup-baby-draw), while I went 2-4-2. I guess that our bias is expressed by the choices we have made to get where we are. I think it's easy to pick the startup because the experiences can be more easily related to someone else, while parenting sounds like a whole lot of work and you have to take someone else's word that "Babies make you happy." But the important lesson is to find something that makes you happy and feed it."
I'm so terrified I didn't even click through
I don't know my cell phone number. If someone asks and I'm carrying my GSM, I send them a missed call so they get it. But quite often I forget it at home, and that's embarassing; they think I'm making excuses to avoid giving them my number.
DHH: You don't need a product road map
Ask YC: How will the US economy affect the probability of startup success
In particular how do a recession, rising oil prices, weak dollar, credit crunch affect the probability of startup success. Is this a good time to quit your "safe" day job and dive in head on into a full time startup attempt.
Maybe this should be teached in the very first lesson of any introduction to OOP? (Just to show the real motivation behind that concept...)

In my opinion you can program 'object oriented' in a very implicit way, without ever using a generic function or class.
That risk is not pronounced past 30, but 35. Adding to that, it negligible. It's not like 50% of babies have issues, it's just that a greater percentage do compared to women in their 20's.

Most families these days are started by parents in their 30's.
Actually that's not true. New studies have show a correlation between men's age and down syndrome similar to a women's, although much less pronounced.
Startups: 'More bootstrappy this time'
Was it freakonomics, or elsewhere, where they mention the anthropologist who paid a flat rate for bone fragments? Apparently, the natives were pretty smart, so they took whole bones and smashed them to little bits, to get more money. Oops!
There's an important distinction between "brain exercise" and actual thinking.
Ask YC: exotic comparison shopping startups
While doing a quick research on the topic of "comparison shopping", I came across not only the obvious comparison criteria like price, reviews, user submitted ratings, popularity etc. but also more exotic ones like alonovo.com that allow prospective buyers to look at the behavior (use of green tech, contribution to local community etc.).

http://charteo.us/ allows comparison of popularity, as measured by Amazon Sales Rank, over a period of time (Full disclosure: this one is my baby and inspiration for this research).

What other exotic comparison shopping startups/sites have you come across?
Are Facebook's Social Ads Illegal?
Eight Years Later, Is Microsoft Still a Monopoly?
I prefer to do the mental maintenance tasks myself. Just like Tiger Woods hits 400 balls a day or Kobe Bryant shoots 1000 shots a day. I know my code like the back of my hand so when I wake up at 3:00 a.m. with a thought, I don't need a listing; I know. Nothing ironic about it.
Right. Just like there's an important distinction between pushing a blocking sled and playing a football game. No matter how good they get, athletes still train their bodies. And hackers still train their brains.
What you call embarassing I call scary.
"When Perl 6 arrives I'd like a two colour system that indicates whats a new Perl 6 feature and whats an old Perl 5 feature."

This is one of the funniest sentences that I have ever read.

Is this satire? Or should I be even more glad that I switched to Ruby than I already am?
there's no way to delete your account on facebook either
Too bad we have no technical details about BD+ or the alleged crack, so it's hard to know what's true and what's spin.
Solving Puzzles vs. Solving Mysteries - The (un)importance of information
Maybe I'm not understanding you, but are you saying beyond 35 the risk plateaus? This graph seems to say otherwise.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Trisomy21_graph.jpg

I wouldn't even consider starting a family later than 35. And look at 45! More than a 1 in 33 chance you will have a child with Down syndrome (Trisomy 21) after 45...those are definitely not gambling odds.
Salesforce is actually 4. Not 1. There is one 'charismatic' fellow, but it was started by 4 folks.
In the early 2000, we had Asian financial crisis, Y2K, dotcom bomb, telecom burst, stock market crash, 9/11 attack, war in Afghanistan, SARS, launch of the Iraq invasion, outbreak of avian flu, but yet in retrospect, it was the best time to do a startup. So you can't really differentiate with good timing. But you can differentiate from bad timing. When it is difficult for you, it is also difficult for everyone else. But they don't have the same strong will to succeed as you do. By the way, if you have the luxury of pondering where or not this is the right time to leave your day job, my advise is to stay where you are and just wonder out loud what could have been and should have been. It really takes a lot to succeed in a startup. Having any backup plan is the wrong place to start. Good luck.
The more people go on and on about how bad the economy is, the more they are self-selecting out of doing a startup. That's good for me.

Startups work or don't work based on how they relate to users. The "economy" is a huge average of all kinds of things. If you're making users happy, just keep your eye on the ball. All things being equal, I would rather run a startup in a hot market where all the other competitors were depressed than the same market swimming in investment cash.

Of course, there are lots of exceptions. This answer was just a generalization. YMMV. I'm sure somebody will reply with something pithy like "but if the town is on fire, should you really be trying to sell charcoal?" to which I reply, "if you have a product people want, it doesn't matter what the heck the rest of the town is doing"
Firebug can make Gmail slow
By the way, if you are interested in learning more about the trials and tribulations of a startup, please take a look of my online book, http://www.StartupForLess.com.

--Denny--
you know, he could have just put a redirect on it...

He's missing the latest iMac too.
Fun to read a real story about people doing it the hard way rather than many such profiles which seem suspiciously like PR.

Not that this isn't PR - its just PR for the little guy.
What Makes a 'Good Idea?'
Startups: 'More Bootstrappy This Time'
Common Lisp and the Towers of Blub
i think that passphrases are a good start, however as the article suggests some websites are to fault. My bank, until it updated it's system recently, didn't allow for special characters in passwords.
I'm pretty scared of Russia these days. I don't think I'd want to do any business with them no matter how good the offer is.
Is indentation also a crutch that keeps your hacking muscles from developing? As far as I can tell, arguments for and against both are exactly the same. If you like one and not the other, it's a sign that these are matters of personal preference more than anything else.
Why am I not surprised that a Perl programmer feels that he's too good for syntax highlighting?

That said, I do like some of his alternative highlighting ideas. Maybe someone can hack together something with svn/cvs, etc.
Attack of the Splogs--One Of Our Posts Copied 152 Times Without Attribution
I have a suspicion that Google makes a shitload of money off of spam sites. I have a friend who makes upwards of 1000 dollars a month off of scraped content.

If I were 'economically rational', I ought to be doing the same thing instead of screwing around with things like langpop and squeezed books.
An old hat with new tricks: Fedora 8 officially released
Weak dollar is a good thing if you're in the US and making a product or service that people abroad would buy. It's cheaper for them, hence they'll be more likely to buy and will buy more of it. On the other hand if you're in Europe, Australia, or even Canada and you plan to rely a lot on US sales then you may want to pick something different. Other than that I don't see anything significant to worry about.
Spammers are also using Amazon Mechanical Turk to reword posts and articles in dozens of differnt ways. This helps them get around services such as Attributor.

SLEAZY!
Enterprises Inching toward 2.0, Startups already there
What our corporations need to do to adapt to a knowledge economy.
I've been reading a certain blog that deals with 'adsensing' and making money on the web through joint ventures, arbitrage etc. There are people out there who make $100K a month (and some that make over $1M a month) using all kinds of schemes. Yes, Google makes a ton of money too off these guys as well. I've never tried any of these things myself...
I've seen software (I think they charge over $4K per install) that uses hidden markov chains etc to create content that looks like it was written by humans. You give it few keywords that you'd like to optimize your site/pages for and this thing does the rest. Google does ban few of them but they're getting more sophisticated with every new version so Google has really hard time keeping up.
i call my programs babies :(
The US economy shouldn't effect you if you have something to sell to international consumers. Focus on internationalization and a weak US dollar can be good for your business.
A Brief History of Text Analytics
This is a statistical anomaly.

The poster bases his logic on statistics, saying that many companies were started by a single person--which may indeed be the most popular combination, as it seems that whenever a BusinessWeek slideshow is posted here listing the top 10 hottest startups, half are about companies with single founders. This makes sense--the founder created a project to solve a problem, not to make money; then, it took off--in contrast to gathering three people and "forcing" them to create something that can be sold to a VC three months to two years later.

Now, pg is probably right that most of the people he has ever met had a co-founder (he should know). The problem is, even according to the list above, FIVE of every SIX people on that list will tell you they have a co-founder. 5.00 out of every 6.11 to be exact. That does not mean those companies are more successful. I think that reasoning is flawed. Not only is this misleading numerically, but on top of that, it's probably misleading socially since the single founder is always programming while teams with multiple founders are much more likely to make outside contact with investors like pg, being that there is more of them.

Also, if two or three people believe in the idea versus one, that does not mean the first team has a better chance to make a better product.

However, if you are going to move to the Silicon Valley as a single founder, and expect to get a co-founder or employee later, I'm guessing it will be nearly impossible to get anyone on short notice, if at all. Therefore, if you're going to start with money, you may as well bring a committed team with you. I wouldn't be surprised if it's probably easier to get money in Silicon Valley than to find people to join you once you've already moved there. This is why, although YCombinator is probably better in Silicon Valley than any other place, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that most applicants are from outside the region. Any stats on this, pg?
I've read about that software, too, although from a research perspective: http://www.eblong.com/zarf/markov/

I would have never thought to use it for spam generation, though... I have to admit (grudgingly) that some of those spammers are clever.
I respect your preference, so I will try to respond with some colloquial form of reasoning.

Please forgive the slight abuse of information theory...in general, styled text will have lower entropy than the same un-styled text. Low-entropy text will be more memorable than high-entropy text because it contains more information. It's like a chapter heading in a book - not only is it interesting and informative, the style provides the context that it is a heading and not the first sentence.

Re-reading my previous comment, one could misconstrue that my editor looks like a crayon box. It doesn't. I use fairly subtle styles for most parts of the text, with only a select few items in bold or bright styles (keywords, constants). It helps to skews the distribution of what grabs my attention and what does not.
How many largish bloggers are there? 10,000 maybe? Certainly, when the pagerank hits a certain point, keeping a human-verified whitelist of sites is doable.

That is, if something is getting a high enough position on google, a google rep could look for a phone number and verify that a human, not a bot, is behind the content.

Of course, this will hurt short-term ad revenue...
yeah, for whatever reason graphic designers don't tend to congregate there. great for cheap little programming tasks, not so great for original design.

I think it has something to do with the fact that you can turn out shoddy code that produces a functional program, whereas shoddy design is immediately apparent

that's why a lot of design stuff you get when outsourcing is template-based and replicated across multiple sites.
I like the idea but I think you need a designer

Good Luck
I found a couple the other week when I took off all the cushions on the couch and looked at the stuff that had fallen down there.
http://www.programmermeetdesigner.com/
Why is multiplication commutative?
All it would take is a google toolbar button "kill the splog"
MIT Sues Frank Gehry Over Design of Celebrity Architect's 'Party of Drunken Robots' Building
That MIT would be foolish enough to build something this ugly is hard to understand. But again, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
I'm surprised how many people don't like syntax highlighting. I appreciate it because it helps me eliminate a small class of errors while coding, which is misspelling keywords and improperly delimiting expressions. In Python, for example, there are 4 different ways to delimit strings, so having syntax highlighting indicates quickly to me when I accidentally ended a multi-line string with a """ instead of what I began it with: '''.

I also find myself doing weird things sometimes when I get tired, like instead of saying "class Foo", I'll type "def class Foo". Seeing the keyword "class" stand out in the second instance is a quick clue that I'm doing something stupid.

There are also cases where I've unthinkingly wanted to name a variable the same as a keyword. Without syntax highlighting, I would have received a strange error at compile time complaining about invalid syntax, but instead, I see right away what I've done and avoid the problem altogether.

In the end, it's not a matter of whether or not I know my code or know the language inside and out. It's simply a matter of quickly and effectively fixing a large majority of small gaffs in my thinking and inadvertent mistakes. Call it a crutch all you want, but you could just as easily say that if you're not coding in hex, you're using a compiler as a crutch. What's wrong with making your job easier?
Yes it is.

You can temporarily suspend your account but facebook still keep all of your data and then when you reactivate your account, all of your information is still there from your past account.

The net result is you can never take out your information. The only difference is perception.
I assume you haven't been inside. It's by far the coolest campus building (on a campus filled with cool buildings). Lots of natural light, lots of wide open spaces, and a general vibe of forcing people to run into each other for interesting conversations. I mean, the main hallway has walls covered in huge blackboards (and chalk stored behind).
Facebook's secret plans for world domination have been revealed.
i love his tumblelog, two cool pics and a bunch of links
i dare you to browse all the posts and I bet you'll agree with the theme of at least one post, maybe not the language, but the theme.

If your not at all cynical - i'd probably stay away.
That's Your AIM in My GTalk
It really is quite sad, isn't it? I mean the US isn't the prettiest flower, but Russia: all I can think of is negative things coming out of that place. It is a true (they don't even try hiding it there) oligarchy, and has most organized crime in the world, which unsurprisingly leads to the perfect ecosystem for malicious hackers.
That is finance. People in that industry are trained to exploit the system at every turn. Very cool, considering its (mostly) a bunch of rich, snobby NYC people losing money.
No, I'm agreeing with you... data I had seen showed an even larger increase after 35.

I think though, at 35, you may feel a little differently about those risks, especially given that down syndrome can be detected in-utero.
That sounds functionally good, but why make it so hideously ugly? In 20 years, people may think that the powers that be at MIT in our current era were totally clueless about design and crazy to build something so laughable.
Mm, so what I understand is that Google has duplicate content detection to punish people who do this kind of thing.

However! If you have a high-ranking site and you scrape from a low-ranking site, Google might index you first and think the originating site was stealing "your" content!

And then there's the fact that it wouldn't be hard to replace words with synonyms, chopping up multiple articles, etc. so that Google probably wouldn't detect it. This is what spammers do.
PageRank has become the API for web content itself
heh. I think you're asking the wrong people man. We're a pretty optimistic bunch!
It might give some investors cold feet. But I don't think startup founders should let the state of the economy be a deciding factor in what they do. It has much less effect on the outcome than how hard you work, or how carefully you hire, or how much attention you pay to the design of your site.
Pmarca donates US$28 million to Stanford's hospital
Selling to doctors/hospitals will be very hard work, even if you're from that background. I wish you the best of luck.
Ok, we get the message: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=gigamon
You forget something: people that download said killsplog feature are not going to be running into splogs often (i don't). Other than that, I think its just fine...good for the economy. Eventually (as Eric S. ) said, advertisers will wise up, and start paying less. If they don't, good for google.
I don't know why anyone would invest in a fund that does not have the managers keep a large portion of their own net worth tied up in the fund. There is a huge information asymmetry. The investor does not know if the fund performs well because the manager is brilliant, or if it's because the risk profile is far worse than advertised.
A sweet presentation on maintaining web apps from Wikia
Why is TechCrunch not suing(or threatening) Google here? Personally I am very skeptical and critical of our copyright system, but these sites which are copying content AND getting paid to do it gain no sympathy from me. How does Google get away with keeping these people in business?