skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Banquet needs a PHP codin' CSS/DOM God
Could you code MODI, XRay, Clipmarks or similar behind your back? Do you know all the horrible CSS hacks sites use to render across different browsers?

Banquet needs a PHP codin' CSS/DOM God. We're a small (2 person) startup. Anyone who's ever heard of our product wants to use it. Mike came up with the idea and design, Damon wrote the code.

What We Need

Proven experience in DOM manipulation, capable of taking on a major share of work involving a CSS / DOM manipulation engine.
Performance optimized, yet elegant code. Know Rails but can still code PHP? We love you.
Capable of moving to the valley if required (see point about equity below).

What We Offer

Initially 4-6 weeks paid, full time work. Screw ramen, we're giving you actual money.
Very strong (think Mr. T) possibility of equity for the right candidate.
An awesome project with good, technical, people. Some of whom are real live Australians.

Interested? Drop Mike a line at mike.maccana@gmail.com
Already implemented, using DNS as the repository, and supported in every Unix mailer for the last decade and the latest Exchange too.

Google for RBL or ORBS. Some are free, some charge for access to their DNS servers (ie, if you find a record for their hostname on the blacklist DNS server, they're a spammer or open relay).
7 Person Year Application Rewritten in 2 Person Months
A lone programmer rewrites an entire project in 2 months. It uses executable specifications. It is thrown away because nobody else understands it. (LISP, YACC. or something else?)
I am not talking about open mail relays, though, I am more interested in hijacked private machines (ie with dynamic IP addresses). Does ORBS take care of that, too? If so, all the better, all that needs to be done is a web interface for querying orbs.

How does ORBS get it's list of IP-addresses?
very interesting...although basing your model's assumptions on another random startup may not be "better" than making your own assumptions. they are a good guy check guide if nothing else though.
I like the long o version better, myself. Zahbnee sounds a lot like zombie. Probably not the best association . . .
hehehe, It is a great rhythm, and not so hard to learn.
That kind of music is the best for dancing!
"Australian actresses are plagiarizing my quantum mechanics lecture to sell printers" (not a joke!)
> Graduating with a technical degree is like heading out into the real world armed with an assault rifle instead of a dull knife. Don't miss that opportunity because of some fuzzy romanticized view of liberal arts broadening your horizons -- that's a great way to end up wanting to kill yourself when you hit 30 and you realize you still haven't done anything with your life.

The problem with this entire line of thinking is that sure having an assault rifle is great but it doesn't do much good if you don't have any context to know where to point it.

Think of a technical skill or degree as the lens through which you focus a broader education.

The broader education allows you do apply technical solutions to non-technical problems and may even help you come up with that "big idea".

Look at PG, he seems to be doing pretty well on both accounts (undergrad liberal arts degree, grad technical degree).
did you go beyond originalsignal's front page like:
http://web20.originalsignal.com/ ?
Anyone for a philosophy start-up !
Executable specifications. The new compiler was about 5000 lines of Java. The developer says he can probably reduce most of 3000 lines of it to about 700 productions in YACC. Of course, nobody is interested!
I take that for granted too, but it does seem like a dilemma for AWS. If instances rarely terminate, people psychologically rely upon them to remain running and end up getting careless. But it's distasteful to arbitrarily end people's instances every 7-10 days just to lower their expectations.
I just can't believe you went on record saying that one of your goals is to cash out within 5 years.
Facebook - Fastest Growing Site in the U.K. Says Comscore
Yeah, unfortunately I wasn't at the meeting. I've had a talk with the team about that.
A list of 15 of the top small workplaces of 2007
I received an email the other day when I made a page for our group to fill in contact information like cell numbers, where someone wanted me to edit their info.

My only thought was "do you know how wikis work?".

Also, the link from our intranet page to the wiki is titled "Wiki Blog". I'm amazed the person who wrote that title, who must know _something_ about the intertubes to be editing the page, could think a wiki is a blog. sigh.
i had two ec2 instances go down. first time it has happened to me. i was sitting right there when it happened, so.... good timing.
"...I don't want to bury anyone else's reputation..."

That's not for you to decide. If what they did was unethical, then you have a responsibility to share. If it wasn't, then anything you say won't matter anyway.

I place ethics more important than anything else when considering partners. WAY more important that skill, work ethic, or connections. Take it from someone who has been burned more than once by lying, cheating, stealing, and backroom deals that my partners thought were "no big deal". F*ck 'em. They'll never get a second chance with me. Never.

You're probably tempted to say nothing so you don't offend. Don't. Spare the rest of the community the same potential headache and tell the whole story.

(Personally, if someone tried to poach my partner, only one of us would leave the room alive. This isn't a game anymore.)
they emailed me about 6 hours later, but when it comes down to it, program for ec2 redundantly.
One recommendation I have (in spite of PG's essay) is that if you take a course in Classics or "Western Humanities" as it was called at my college, take it from a Philosophy professor.

I might have just been lucky, but they always had the most interesting discussion and criticism of the stuff we were reading. One of the best discussions about the scientific method I've ever had came from in a Humanities class taught by a philosophy prof. One of the first things we read was Galileo's letters on sunspots. Later in the semester we demonstrated how Freud's theories were completely unscientific (because they were unfalsifiable/untestable). I actually never really understood the difference between axioms and theorems until I took that class. I mean, I knew vaguely that an axiom was a rule and a theorem was a confirmed hypothesis, but the fact that axioms are essentially arbitrary never really sunk in. In actual science classes I was always too busy learning details to think about the abstract stuff.
Many of the successful people I know do have an engineering degree. Of the first four I can think of, there are two engineers, one MBA, and one MD.
Algorithm Basics?
To all hackers out there. I am a self taught programmer who wants to start with the very basics of algorithms and data structures. I took a look at "Introduction to Algorithms" but it came across as more academic than practical. Any suggestions?
poaching == (-balls)
Eh, how could I forget Helen Grimaud:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne_Grimaud

She has a great recording of what is probably my favorite piece: Brahms Piano Concerto no. 1

http://www.amazon.com/H%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne-Grimaud-Brahms-Piano-...
Utility Mill - My Latest Site - Feedback is Appreciated
I've been putting it together over the past few months. I'm hoping it will be really useful to people one day. Thanks in advance for any feedback.
"I don't see why you think it's unethical for them to try to poach your partner."

This is Arthur Anderson thinking, not Y Combinator thinking.

If you jumped on one of my best people "in an instant", then you better be prepared to set aside resources to deal with me. Are you sure you really want to do that?
How about this?

http://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steve-Skiena/d...
This is a site I've been putting it together over the past few months. I'm hoping it will be really useful to people one day. What do you guys think? What would make it more useful to you? Does it explain itself?
Thanks amichail. I will look into it. It does look interesting.
I use IE... once a week to submit my time to a lame corporate outsourced timesheet.
they seem to be doing it: http://www.amihacked.com/

Except I am not sure how they get their data (Spamcop).

So the question remains, why isn't everybody using their service now and then...
What Wrecked Unions?
Yeah, the way this is written it sounds like "your hacker" is Dustin Hoffman in Rainman, and you are his caretaker or something.

On a side note: I had no idea YC teams were this competitive with each other. I still had the image of one big Nerd Summer Camp that happened to spit out companies and connections. This makes it sound more like the Skull and Bones guys competing to meet the President at Secret Meeting X.
I think I might.
Sounds like a prisoner's dilemma kind of problem... individual firms won't benefit from open sourcing unless everyone open sources.
Not at all. Open sourcing your software not only means you share the benefits, but also the costs:

http://web.mit.edu/wwwdev/cgiemail/buybuild.html
Take a look at this: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html
checked it again this morning and it appears you guys fixed it. keep up the good work!
How to use storytelling to motivate your startup staff
The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative , endeavors to explain how telling "a good story" is key to successful leadership, especially at companies in transition (like startups!).
Robert Sedgewick's Algorithms:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201066726
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_structures and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm
I thought for sure this would mention another "innovation" that came out of Chrysler, "Extreme Programming":

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WasChryslerComprehensiveCompensationS...

Short story: Chrylser had been trying to unify its various systems and subsystems for payroll and had failed and failed. Eventually, a group of consultants were brought in who had invented a particular agile technique, extreme-programming. Of course, the project failed, but that didn't keep the consultants from spreading the XP word throughout the world.
Dell MD3000 review.  Great Web 2.0 database storage array.
Most sites like these have email addresses setup that are not used for legitimate reasons so any email they receive is spam. They can then analyze all email received and add the IP address of each server that it received mail from to their list of spam servers. So yes, this would cover zombie computers also.
Sedgewick is good. I learned a lot from this book, which is tailored for C++
http://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-C%2B%2B-Parts-1-4-Fundament...
I think that Marc may have missed something here - he derides the humanities without recognizing that the humanities are a huge part of a typical math/science/engineering curriculum. So while Marc thinks he's comparing "technical" students to "liberal arts" students, he's actually comparing well rounded students (who have studied both science and liberal arts) to narrowly focused students (who have only studied liberal arts).

I double majored in math and literature, but if I'd only done the minimum humanities coursework for math, I still would have been forced to do a ton of humanities. At my college (at UCSD), all students had to study:

2 years of world history and cultures
1 year of a foreign language
1 year of upper division history. literature, or other humanities course
1 year of fine arts or performance arts
2 courses in math, which can be fulfilled with symbolic logic in the philosophy dept and easy statistics (without calculus) through the psychology department.
2 courses in science, which can be fulfilled with "physics for poets" type courses (again, no calculus)

This is regardless of major. So an english major can get through college without ever really studying math or science in a meaningful way, whereas a math student who does the absolute bare minimum is still going to come away with a substantial amount of humanities coursework.

I think it's time to abolish the term "broad liberal arts education". If it's only liberal arts, and doesn't include math and science, it isn't broad. And I think this is what really separates the math/sci/eng students from the humanities majors. An english who took a ton of math not reflected in his/her degree would be just as well prepared - however, these people are very rare.
Yeah, I was curious too but not curious enough to search through the eGullet forums.

And if you like food and pictures of food, check out http://www.offthebroiler.com -- it is the internet's best food blog, notable because the author was the founder of eGullet and happens to be an exceptional food photographer.
Find a problem you want to solve, ideally in a public project with good senior maintainers... you'll learn everything you need by doing.
This sounds familiar. I went through something like this at a Fortune-100 company which I won't name here, except they rejected the solution because it wasn't written in .Net and budgeted around seven figures to rewrite their existing horrible system in .Net. I quit somewhere along the way but I still feel the frustration, pain, and perhaps even anger whenever I think of the stupidity and waste. I hope I never have to go through that again.
I like the general idea a lot. I assume you're shooting for a rather geeky audience, and adding wiki stuff to coding is a pretty sweet idea.

I kind of wish that when using a utility, basically the page feels like I'm just using that utility and that the focus isn't on utility mill itself. Think about how Gawker media positions itself in relationship to its blogs. If you put the main site aside and let the utilities be the forefront, you get bigger viral possibilities since people are likely to pass around a util just because it's handy (rather than passing around util mill). Some steps towards this would be giving utils nice, top level paths (no /utility/) and designing the page so that the non-utility stuff is in a non-imposing frame around it rather than being relatively large.
And why is that a bad thing :)

Some programming languages have us tuned that we have to do all the work ourselves.

It's a paradigm mind shift. Rails enables focus on business, not on code (not that it will scale easily though - it will present the same challenges as every other platform).
Lessons To Learn From Skype
Get an Acer. My TravelMate came with no software other than Windows and stuff necessary to operate the hardware (drivers, DVD burner, touchpad enhancements, user guide, etc.) I've needed to reinstall the OS once in its 3-year lifetime.

It helps that I don't install software lightly. I do most of my development in VMWare under a Linux guest OS, and typically run only Winamp/Gaim/Firefox/SSH/uTorrent under Windows. The one time I did need to reinstall the OS was because I'd been going through a bunch of different programs for movie playback/decompression and some of them didn't play very well together.
I have a grad degree in algorithms and the best book on algorithms is Cormen et all's "Introduction to Algorithms". You will be able to keep this book around forever and you won't outgrow it that easily. Definitely the best book on algos and an excellent reference.

http://projects.csail.mit.edu/clrs/

Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=NLngYyWFl_YC&dq=&pg...
Erlang for Python programmers: Part IV
"Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen, et al came across as not practical? That book is personally my favorite. What are your criteria when judging a book as practical?

As someone else mentioned, you might like Sedgewick's books, but it's hard to tell without knowing what your criteria are.
a good metaphor
Death by board meeting
Hey jey, I came across that book at the local bookstore, and perused it for a while. What I meant by practical was a book that gave me something to get my hands dirty with vs mathematical theories, thats all. Maybe that was a little shortsighted, and considering a lot of the other comments suggest the very same book, I will take a look at it again. Thanks!
From the site it looks like the book is yet to be published, but its available in print...http://tinyurl.com/2kg6to

Though having the draft is quite nice...Thank you
Breakdown of WSJ's Poor Site Design
I fluctuate between indie-ish stuff and techno type things. I'm not up on my music categories, but bands like Say Hi To Your Mom and spoon.

Also piano music. http://jamendo.com has some great free music, particularly Rob Costlow.
I know exactly zero people under the age of 40 who read newspapers. Their demise is unrelated to cellphones.
That's a good idea to put the focus more on the utility. Perhaps someday I could even let people put their logo, and styles on utilites? I also wonder if providing widgetized versions of the utilities might also promote viral possibilities? (That's on my list)
Gathering data has got to be a problem. If any service got popular enough, then it would be in spammers' interest to poison it in order to make people not rely on it.
orph recommended being an apprentice, which is a good approach
try stars of the lid's "and their refinement of the decline." some of the finest ambient music since eno.

http://www.amazon.com/Their-Refinement-Decline-Explicit/dp/B...
this goes right to the very heart of the reptilian mind and neuromarketing. I for one always love a good compelling story. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...
I made a group for Hacker News members to join for last.fm It will create charts and statistics if the group reaches over 15 members. Here is the link: http://www.last.fm/group/Hacker%20News%20%28Ycombinator%29
If Arthur Andersen thinking is defined as "don't take petty crap like this personally, and focus your brain cycles on MSPW", then I have to side with Arthur Andersen. But I suspect that this is a matter on which Paul Graham and David Duncan would be in agreement.
Thanks for the clarification.

At RailsConf 2007, David Heinemeier Hansson started a sentence with something like "If you have---I can't believe I'm saying this---a legacy Rails app..."
He's talking about SCADA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCADA)

Sounds really impressive. If anyone has ever worked with PLCs you know what a nightmare it is to interface with them and deal with their primitve data types. Not to mention programming them in ladder logic (yeah, most industrial machines are still programmed in ladder logic straight from the 1800s.)

So he's not kidding, this is a BIG deal.
Actually, this writer's conclusion, open source, is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what I believe, and what I think is the premise of this forum.

Mega-institution isn't aware of its own golden needle in its haystack? Good! Another opportunity for a couple of hackers in a spare bedroom.
Anyone have any idea what this consultant might have been doing to get this kind of productivity?
Facebook.co.uk owned by ConnectU ?!?
I'm the process of reading the Algorithms book and converting some of the functions to Scheme :D
"It's not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business."

And it certainly isn't petty. I don't care how much technical talent you have, if you're not prepared to compete in business, whatever the threat, you're toast. Poaching my people is crossing the line.

And I don't care what Paul Graham, David Duncan, or anyone else thinks. On this issue, you shouldn't either. Ethics is non-negotiable.
linking to a whois lookup will invariably exceed the query limit
About game soundtracks: they're also designed to be catchy given very constrained sequencing. On, say, the PS3 or the Wii, you can just have a full, ambient MP3 and nobody will bat an eyelash. But on, say, the NES, you had to make every tone count, just like you had to make every pixel count. This pushed games composers to focus on the core melody, giving the world such memorable tunes as Mario and Zelda (Tetris was just a conversion of a real song, interestingly.)

Of course, after these well-thought-out melodies are born, they can be dressed up all you like. http://ocremix.org/ is the exemplar there.
Uhh...where does the $50 billion come from again?
Nokia Buys Navteq for $8.1 Billion
Hey folks, I am indeed the notorious "poacher" and the poster boy for unethical YC practices.

View my response here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=62109
Your Brain, Creative or Out of Shape?
If you're stressed out, tired and out of shape, so is your brain. No wonder it's hard to come up with new ideas
"If you're not prepared to compete in business, whatever the threat, you're toast."

"Poaching my people is crossing the line."

Those two statements look juxtaposed to me. It sounds to me like you're the one who isn't prepared to compete if you aren't willing to pose such a threat to your competitors, or to contend with it when you're on the receiving end.
House music, downtempo chill type.

Avoid music with vocals, or that is too upbeat/danceble type, as it will be hard to concetrate on anything.
What the hell? I know everyone involved apparently . . .
Ask YC: Should I look for funding?
Hey all- I've always seen thoughtful responses for the "Ask YC" threads, so I figured I'd give it a whirl.

We've been working on RescueTime.com for about 8 months as a "side project" and have seen a LOT more traction/interest than we expected. We've gotten over 5,000 private beta signups (anywhere from 5 to 60 new ones per day nowadays), a couple of glowing reviews from bloggers who've used our software, and (most importantly) emails from users who are excited/passionate about what we're doing.

We've got a long list of cool things we could do with RescueTime (many of them suggestions from our users) and I'm willing to make the full-time leap. Having sold 2 companies in the past, I'm in the financial position to work on it without compensation (but NOT in the financial position to fund a team). I have partners who are relatively risk averse (and are also very well-compensated for their day jobs). I'm pretty sure we could come to some sort of terms if I wanted to kick it up a notch.

So... Is this enough traction to justify looking for funding? Is the productivity/lifestreaming space big enough to justify investment? Should I try to find a rails hacker to dive in on this full time with me? Or should I go find something else to tinker with and let RescueTime coast as a part-time "hobby" project?

(if anyone has any questions about monetization strategies, team, etc., feel free to ask)
Airing your dispute in a public forum like this makes you both seem like damaged goods.
Zero 7 are awesome. They have been around for a while. I heard their concert in SF was breathtaking (they came last year).

http://youtube.com/watch?v=INn1C6ImJKg
There are a number of tools available for making web applications using Common Lisp. Most or all work well on SBCL. I don't think any are as mature as Rails. Most Lispers don't take the all-in-one approach of Rails - they're more likely to use a collection of libraries than a framework. Some tools to look at are Hunchentoot, CL-WHO, HTML-template, Weblocks, Uncommonweb, CLSQL and Kpax.
We got more memory installed on the server.
Launching a UK Start-Up: Seven Lessons Learned
Two of my developers were on the original XP team at Chrysler. They don't to XP at Chrysler anymore either.
As far as I can tell from the article: Magic.

Or, maybe he called it "agile", but I'm not really thinking gymnasts and ballerinas are magically great developers, though they are strikingly agile. This article needs some kind of detail--it doesn't answer most of the W's of good journalism: Who, what, when, where, why, and how. We've only got a really vague what ("a good developer built something that I liked a lot") and a vague where (Chrysler). Somehow all of the good bits are completely left out.
I'll venture to say that no matter who was right/wrong you may just have taken a significant step towards not being accepted.