skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In case you're wondering whether the condescension exuded by this title is for real, check out the first paragraph:

Need more productivity from your software development staff? Need 'em to put in more hours to get a project done on time? Buy 'em a pizza and hand out t-shirts. It's an age-old and effective method to get programmers and techies to willingly (sometimes enthusiastically) give up a weekend. But why do they come so cheap?

What a great summary of everything that's wrong with this moribund, soulless industry.
And while writing this article, the author took his own advice.
New Data Confirms Growing Influence of Internet on Politics, But Not Quite Yet the Deciding Factor
Anybody know / willing to guess how fast this car can go?
Space exploration is expensive. Colonization is an existential necessity, and should be funded with an order of magnitude more than NASA receives.

Tossing humans into low earth orbit to do rings around the earth isn't demonstrably advancing us to avoid certain death as a species.

[edit: everything done today in space should be done by robots. Everything.]
This is a very ugly website with a very bad (and long) domain.

How did you found it?
Bandsintown is giving away 5 pairs of tickets, so leave a comment here and they are yours.

http://www.bandsintown.com/event/604111

Information from Xconomy about the event:
We set out to put this event together because we had the suspicion that a surprising number of folks in the local tech and life science scene had secret musical alter egos. What's more surprising, at least if the bands who entered the competition are any indication, is that so many of the bands these folks play in are so damn good. That's why we're grateful to the judges who helped us make the tough calls necessary to narrow down the competition: Art Technology Group co-founder Jeet Singh, who goes by the name Miki when he fronts the band Dragonfly, and Patrick Faucher, a Berklee College of Music grad, lifelong musician and technologist, and co-founder of Nimbit. Thanks guys!

All we need now is you. The final winner of the Xconomy Battle of the Tech Bands will be chosen by the audience, using a nifty cell-phone voting system, so be sure to bring your cell phone along. Tickets for the event, (which will go down at the Middle East Restaurant and Nightclub at 472-480 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge) are $20 in advance at www.xconomybands.eventbrite.com--actually only $15 if you buy in blocks of 10--and $25 at the door. That gets you not only admission, but also a little something to eat and drink.

But wait, there's more! Everyone who attends will be eligible to win one of our fantastic door prizes, including two Rock Band bundles from Harmonix Music Systems and three Microsoft Zune music players.

So come and cheer for your favorite band--or maybe find yourself a new one--and help us celebrate the Boston technology community's propensity for rocking out.

more on the event here:
http://www.xconomy.com/2008/01/11/let-the-band-battle-begin/
I agree with the second half of what you say, and I'll let Charlie Stross break the bad news to you about the first half:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...
I'm offended by your #FFFFFF supremacist views.
Rails Shared Hosting
This article is exactly right if you have a concrete functional spec of what the code is supposed to do. It's advantages become crystal clear when you have multiple developers on the same codebase and are coding in a lower-level language. It is mechanistic and dull but it works.
Clever title. But true. Dreamhost begging for Rails developers to help them run Rails on their shared hosts is a lot like the blighted urban area trying to get a Trader Joe's in their neighborhood instead of another dollar store.
Good stuff:

"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth."
"It is true that, for every dollar we spend on the space program, the U.S. economy receives about $8 of economic benefit."

Hmm?!?!
Hardest thing about pointers is that it forces the programmer to switch abstraction levels. One moment you're thinking about values and the next your thinking about memory addresses and the values at those addresses. Also, I've gotten more than one :| look when I've said to people that pointers are variables of their own and you can get pointers to them and do all sorts of nasty stuff.

I have a feeling that if you learned Assembler and then a language without pointers and then came to C, you'd still be confused.
Yeah, on that note, it'd be nice to make a database of VCs and make profiles based on how they treat founders based on publicly available information. Just look at their track records and that will help you decide whether or not to take funding.
I hope someday I too can say, "Because I'm the CEO, and I think it can be done.

* Time, 2005-10-24
* On why Jobs chose to override engineers who thought the iMac wasn't feasible."
If we're going to have government spending, we might as well spend it on something interesting and beneficial, rather than finding new ways to ruin countries and kill people.
Emacs + Slime + Swank = <3 and 0 interruption when deploying new code. Swank is an amazing tool to connect to a remote REPL. I wonder what the Vim lovers do without it.

And don't forget Paredit ... in fact just go ahead and read http://www.cliki.net/Editing%20Lisp%20Code%20with%20Emacs
Try looking at the following alternative notation, and see if it makes more sense:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

void fn(char* c) {
printf("[%c]\n", *c);
}

int main() {
char* c;
c = malloc( sizeof(char) );
*c = 'a';

printf("start\n");

fn(c);

return 0;
}

Regards,

dclayton
I was going to just mention heroku, a service that I absolutely love as a beta user, but someone beat me to it in the blog comments.
#FFFFFFey always be keepin' the #000000 man down!
Somehow, it seems like making money and making meaning are two sides of a Mobius strip. They are really the same thing, although they appear to be different. Fooling oneself into thinking they really are separate things is harmful to the wealth of an entrepreneur.
> SagaciousSmartassCommentGenerator.com?

Sorry, Network Solutions already took that domain...
I agree, I swank into both my local Repl and into my cloud Repl - it is pretty sweet.
You win some, you lose some.

That said, I generally use the down-arrow sparingly on this site, specifically against abuse, trollery, or willful stupidity.

It would be sad if the down-arrow became a general "I disagree" button like it is on reddit.
Naturally, you will pardon my wariness of clicking a link to "lovemytool.com".
I agree with that. I think they are closely related.

However, my experience is that as entrepreneurs we can lure ourselves into thinking that bringing good to the world and building a great company is the end and not the means. And if we do that, then money will follow. This is the primary message from Guy Kawasaki whom I have tremendous respect for.

However, my own experience is that this is true is if the stars and moons are aligned. So I am offering an alternative which is to focus on making money first.

This is in contraction to what a VC would want to hear. But I am of the opinion that taking VC money is not the prerequisite of building startup.

At the same time, I am not trying to demonize VC's. They have a place in our world and when appropriate, it can be very important to us.

In summary, I just want to provide some food for thoughts.

Thanks for your comment.

--Denny--
Sorry about that. I hope all is forgiven.

--Denny--
Please check the appropriate boxes regarding your ethnicity:

[ ] #FFFFFF

[ ] #FFFF00

[ ] #C78D4E

[ ] #000000

[ ] Other - #_ _ _ _ _ _

In all seriousness, most standardized tests / school apps seem to come across this way.
I always thought that Drucker said it best: "Profit is the cost of doing business."

Businesses exist for a purpose: to provide goods and/or services to customers. They don't exist just to make money. You can make money in plenty of other ways and not have a business. (Think about a lottery winner or speculator.)

But if you want to keep doing business, you have to make money, and you have to make money over and above the cost of capital. Otherwise, you'll never be able to marshal the resources necessary to keep providing your goods and services.
Can everyone mod this up so I can reach 250? (I only need 20 more)

Please ...
That's exactly right, thank you.

In some way, VC money is a contaminant and startups that have lots of VC money (my first startup was one of those) tend to forget this truth.

--Denny--
I've read that wonderful essay. But he is wrong.

I'm confident that on a long enough time scale, human death wont be necessary and we'll be able to backup and fork our intelligence in machines.

On that time scale, colonization is entirely possible, even without the inevitable expansion of knowledge of physics that might enable faster than light information transfer. Information is all that is necessary to transfer if you upload your intelligence.

That said, the steps to get into space for scientific purposes and for eventual colonization are identical and largely divergent from the current approach.

Scrap the shuttle and all human missions. Focus on telepresence and robotic intelligence. Build the infrastructure to make it easy to get humans into orbit.
They definitely will say that they don't care how popular is, but that is complete bullshit.

37signals is popular because of Rails, the more popular Rails is, the better for 37signals products.

As a Rails programmer, the more popular Rails is, the more worth are your Rails skills. Simple as that.

For a similar reason, the infamous OS wars are not as pointless as they seem. If I invest in Linux or OS X, I also have an interest to protect that investment, which means the OS in question should keep a minimum level of popularity.
How NOT to handle a layoff, via Tesla
The pointers itself don't seem to be the problem. Rather, it's C's strange syntax which tries to mimick a variable's use in its declaration. I.e. "int * * p;" doesn't mean "p is a pointer to a pointer to an int", but it means "* * p is an int". And so goes away any contradiction.
It seems simple, but this quote probably had the most profound impact on my life, more than any other quote I've ever read/heard:

"When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something."
Stanford Commencement Speech, 2005

I still do that every morning.
Perhaps you should have phrased your request in smartass form.
Automatic funding? ;)
No, Hitler is absolutly bad - not only relatively.

(Believe it or not: This was actually once a topic highly fought over by German historians in the 80ies.)
Step #3: Profit!
"As a Rails programmer, the more popular Rails is, the more worth are your Rails skills."

I know some COBOL consultants who'd disagree.
So maybe we should invest all the money in AI before space becomes worthwhile?
An excellent approach would be to develop robots smart enough to build habitats that humans could use. This would expand knowledge on space hardened environments, autonomy, perception, and just enough launch vehicle tech to make avoiding all humans dieing withing the next century possible.

The investment in AI can be towards a relevant goal.
I was an VI user earlier. But after I switched to dvorak keyboard layout navigating with "hjkl" did not seem that enticing any more.
People Archive:  Videos of great people telling their life stories.
Indeed, they are questionable. :)
Getting work done despite the enterprise
WOOT! 888888
Mind Reading Is Now Possible
chatterbox345_2007: (image of superior temporal gyrus activated)
baller_17_rappajamma: (image of inferior parietal lobe activated)
chatterbox345_2007: lol, d00d, i feel the same way.
try F6F6EF - makes the ycombinator logo stand out more
That's a false dilemma. It's like this argument:

"Why is the government spending money on scientific research? Its most important job is to ensure people's safety, and dollars are scarce! Therefore, the government should put all its efforts into preventing murders, drunk driving, etc., and there should be none left for luxuries like science."

That's a false dilemma because, depending on the situation, it's possible that money spent on scientific research will improve people's welfare more than if that same money was spent on law enforcement. For example, scientific research generates advances in forensics, criminal psychology, and sociology, which can make law enforcement more effective, and also in medicine, energy, and other areas that can improve human life in fundamental ways.

You're right that we're causing a lot of problems in the third world. For example, farm subsidies make it impossible for African farmers (who can produce some crops much more cheaply) to compete with American ones. So African farmers are locked out of the market and stay poor.

It seems that ending farm subsidies is much more important than giving computers to kids. But do you realize how expensive it would be to end farm subsidies? There's an entrenched industry that will fight you every step of the way. It might be a better use of our time and effort to get computers into the hands of poor children. It's far cheaper, and it'll help those kids learn about the outside world, communicate more widely, and learn technical skills that enable a few of them to create huge amounts of wealth in the future.
So I've looked at heroku a bit, and I have to say it's pretty promising. I assume eventually they'll allow you to run your own domains off of it, maybe offer you email, etc. I actually somehow didn't meet the guys at the first Y C dinner, but I think they're going to make a lot of money.

The problem is that it's only one company. Though I'm sure they'll have clones if/when they are successful, the barrier to entry there is a lot higher than simply supporting a language like PHP on a shared hosting system. (I suppose I'm only guessing here, as I've no experience with either building a Heroku like site or operating a shared hosting one, but the sheer numbers certainly imply that.) So there are always going to be 100x more hosting options for a newbie PHP developer, even if the Heroku model catches on.

I chose PHP because I found scores of web hosts for it, and I knew that if I ever wanted to switch, I had options. Also, I think brand new programmers (think high school kids) get in largely by Googling for web hosts, signing up an account, then coding in whatever is available. If 95% of the web hosts they look at are touting PHP, that's going to play a large factor in their choice.

Not to mention that Facebook, Yahoo, etc. are in PHP, as you can easily see by looking at a URL, and that no really large sites are in Rails, and even if they were you wouldn't know it at a glance.
Money multipliers are a pretty well understood idea. US gov spends a dollar, it gets used to buy something, the seller uses it to buy something else, etc. GDP is the value of goods created, and a single dollar used multiple times can be counted many times.

It's a bit naive to make things are so simple. A great example is a huge toy doll, 100 stories tall. Imagine the engineering milestones that would be reached by such a project. Imagine the huge number of people employed!

Those are distracting from the fact we don't need huge toy doll.

Also, you'll never hear a politician point out that the dollar spent has been taxed, and would have not incurred the dead weight loss of the taxation process had it just been spent and re-spent.
Ok. Now, tell me what the difference between an array and a pointer in C is, and what the syntax to pass a pointer to a multi-dimensional array to a function is (j/k, sort of).
thefunded.com is sort of that.
If they're looking for $30 million as an investment, that tells me that they're trying to start another movie studio instead of a startup.
you mean 'your request'.
Huh? it means both.
In what sense? I am guessing they made good money with Cobol for a while. Certainly more than if it had never become popular.
This will blow people's mental models of C (genuine example):

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
char const* c = "hello";

// this is the interesting bit - n[c] == c[n] (n = number literal) !!! I swear, try it.

printf("This program compiles and prints:'%c %c %c %c %c'\n",
0[c], 1[c], 2[c], 3[c], 4[c]);
return 0;
}

// See? I read that both forms are translated to *(c + n),
// which explains the equivalence. Weird, no?
Yes it means both. It is just a hint how to read / write it: Don't make up some type syntax, but use the variable usage syntax and what's left is primitive types.

See http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html for history.

Sadly, C++ destroys that arguably strange consistency by its reference type declarations.
Nice post, Matt. I think that you're absolutely right. It doesn't do well for the mind share of the framework if it requires a CS degree to deploy.

But then, DHH has never really said that he was passionate about the users of his framework. For an example, see the image below.

http://pocoo.org/~mitsuhiko/rails_motivation.jpg

DHH has long said that he improves Rails based on what he and 37 Signals needs, and not what the community needs. His attitude seems to be that it's his framework and he can do what he wants to.

So, no. I don't really see the Rails hosting issue being fixed any time soon.
After reading the article, all is indeed forgiven. Though you might want to consider rebranding to something less porny. ;-)
From 10 Hours a Week, $10 Million a Year - Plenty of Fish
You should learn how to properly capitalize your words, and that quotation marks come after periods.
Two Views of Innovation, Colliding in Washington - Patent Reform Act
It is a tough call. The primary site, LoveMyTool, is an on-line marketing site for network monitoring TOOLs so at least there is some excuses for it.

It is a difficult name to forget.

--Denny--
I use OpenID and it's frustrating that websites don't accept it. On this website, for example, I was forced to use BugMeNot. Why? I don't like being forced into this position.
Oh, I am closet spelling and grammar nazi myself. I just wish I could edit posts for longer - since English is not my first language I can seldom spare the concentration needed for flawless writing.
What I wanted to question was whether those huge up-front expenses needed to design and manufacture a new kind of laptop were worth it. I mean even if you had to pay $200 on ebay - you'd have virtually zero fixed costs.

Perhaps that project just does not need to scale down.

Sure the XO is a nice piece of equipment. I would even buy one myself for 100$ if it was available on the market. (Besides I'd really like to try a crank to power my computing - but it's does not come with the normal XO, or?)
sizeof(char) is always 1.
Interesting quote:
"Writing in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1981, George Vaillant, a Harvard psychiatrist who's spent the bulk of his career devoted to the study of adult resilience and coping, argued that childhood capacity for work is one of the best predictors of adult mental health and the capacity to love. He based his conclusion on a famous longitudinal study of 456 young men from inner Boston who, starting in the forties, were followed beginning at age 14. All came from blue-collar and welfare families, and none, at least at the time of their selection, had juvenile records. The subjects were assigned ratings for their ability to work as teenagers--in school, at home, in jobs outside the home, in extracurricular pursuits--and they were reinterviewed at several intervals since, at ages 25, 31, 47. The outcomes were pretty stark. Those who demonstrated the greatest capacity for work as 14-year-olds were five times more likely to be paid well for their work at 47 than those who scored lowest, and sixteen times less likely to have experienced unemployment--and intelligence, Vaillant was careful to note, did little to mediate the latter outcomes. They were also twice as likely to have warm relations with a wide variety of people and almost twice as likely to still be enjoying their first marriages. But perhaps the most striking datum was what Vaillant wryly called a "value-free definition of health": Those who had the poorest ratings were six times as likely, at age 47, to be dead."

I think the premise that this is a problem for the rich is a bit off though. Plenty or poor and middle class people are mean, lazy, or stupid too. The truth is simply that money won't solve all of your problems.
Man have we all forgotten the most important part of this comment? What happened between you and the girl? Didn't you ask her out?!!
I don't have any plans to ever support it. I think it's an ill-conceived system that teaches users to fall prey to identity theft.
The quote-after-period thing is a rule I deliberately break. I dun like it. It's just not me.
Probably not a good idea...

http://www.bugmenot.com/view/news.ycombinator.com
Cheap DYI Laser
Maxed Out Mac Requires A Mortgage
I've implemented it, and I use it on a handful of sites that support it (various blogs, Highrise, BlinkSale).
See? I read that both forms are translated to * (c + n), which
explains the equivalence. Weird, no?

Well, that surely is evil, yet perfectly valid C code. But personally, I don't find it surprising. Of course, you need to grok what A[n] really is -- i.e., syntactic sugar for *(A + n), as you just explained.
Thanks! PG, can you let us customize the whole CSS?

(That will help people who can't use Firefox at their day job / all computers that they log in will have same YCN style)

Also you may want to give this facility to everyone and give something else to us 200+ers... May be 5 down votes that we can use on submissions per month...
I actually went to one of those "full disclosure" meetings when I used to work for a pharma. They put me up for 2 days in the Vegas Four Seasons in exchange for a 15 minute presentation :)

Rubber chicken indeed, but I'll take free food in exchange for that room any day of the week.
Unfold in Python
He probably should have fired those engineers immediately.

"Nope, sir. Can't do it. Can't be done. Can't put a computer in a plastic case with the monitor."
Yeah, I run red lights because I dun like them. They're just not me.
Solving Sudoku puzzles with Python
Mark Zuckerberg interviewed on CBS 60 Minutes Sunday About Being 23 Years Old
Embrace Thy Constraints
My Favorite Math Party Trick
From what my friends have experienced with their sites, I'd say you're better off with putting your time in doing something else. OpenID is LONG way off from becoming mainstream. On consumer sites, it's RARELY used, unfortunately.
Is that a gun in your briefcase or are you happy to see me?
What PHP Deployment Gets Right
You were "forced" to use bugmenot? Why not just choose a unique ID?

I don't understand some of these people who are hyper-security-conscious to the point of insanity. It affects their enjoyment of the internet.
I'd say that the lack of OpenID on consumer sites is fortunate, because it would just confuse 95% of people.

It confuses some geeky/internet-savvy people too, just because of the horrifically bad implementation and design of the OpenID system.
Serves me right.
Do you suppose he had the foresight to register plentyofluck.com as well?
The most expensive Dell tower you can buy is well over $29,000. This is not news.