skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Algorithms are mathematical theories. You're not going to be able to learn them through code alone.

There are certainly less dense introductions to the subject, but Cormen is the classic that you'll see on every good programmer's shelf (and they even read it, too!)

Edit -- "Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis" by Mark Allen Weiss is an example of a common, less-dense introductory text. It's actually not bad, given its intent.
Writing two or three very clever grammars.
And on that note, may I advise everyone involved to stand down? You guys have both gotten a shot off at each other . . . now go and build your great products!
Browser Tests, Services and Compatibility Test Suites | Developer's Toolbox
Yes. You have run into the nature of a non-disclosure agreement the big three have everyone sign. You cannot tell the good parts.
The test is how much you want to start a company, not how well something you wrote is doing. Someone who is smart and energetic and wants to start a company very much has a good chance of getting funded with zero lines of code.
PYTHON TOOLBOX: 25+ Tools For Taming Python
This isn't a question of ethics. This is a question of whether you and the company you're building is worth the talent you have put together to build it. If, particularly at this early stage (the article says the silly words "this late in the game", as though applying to YC is the finish line) your partner were to come to the conclusion that another company were a better opportunity, then your problem is with your business or with your partner. It has nothing to do with other possible businesses that might want your partners talents on their side.

If you're not prepared to deal with the problem of getting and keeping good developers in a highly competitive market, then you're not equipped to deal with running a business in the tech industry. You will be astounded by how hard it is to recruit the very best talent. Middle tier and lesser developers are abundant...it's the cream of the crop, the people who deliver solid, reliable, working code day in and day out, that are difficult to find and to keep.

Welcome to the real world of business, where you have to worry about things like that.
Walk Faster and Ignore the Roses
Best place to find freelance PHP/Ruby/Python developers?
I'm looking to have a small project done and was wondering where's the best place to find a freelancer (on a budget)? I'd like it to be done in either PHP, Ruby, or Python. I'm a little hesitant of trying those "elance/rentacoder" sites since it seems most are inexperienced and not true hackers.

Any help would be appreciated.
Join the Hacker News last.fm group! 
This seems like a good way to see what music tastes us Hackers like.
Unless you and your accuser are asserting that Hacker X is a man slave, I don't think he can be owned.
it just did.
"I will need written consent from former collaborators"

Oh no, this won't be met with any blank stares at all.
Introducing PudlleMedia: Absolutely Free phone calls to North America thanks to ads
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>Someone who is smart and energetic and wants to start a company very much has a good chance of getting funded with zero lines of code.

I'm sorry, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I doubt the average smart and energetic person that posts on news.yc has a significant chance of getting funded with zero lines of code and no users. How would you recommend someone with zero code that passes the "start a company test" secure funding?

While I'm sure some people can raise money without any code, I think it would take a previous relationship with investors or another close connection to angels that invest in web services.
I share Marc's (and your) skepticism about the value of a Ph.D., which is part of why I said that graduate degrees are overrated. I also counsel undergraduates to consider the large opportunity costs of graduate school. But I was taking issue with the sloppiness of the statement "most of the people who have a huge impact on the world . . . do not have PhD's", which would seem to be true whether or not having a Ph.D. is particularly valuable. It's sort of like saying "most of the people who have a huge impact on the world are not left-handed". Well, yes, but that's true even if you replace "the world" with "baseball", and yet lefties have proportionally more impact in baseball despite still being a minority. The question is, can the same be said of Ph.D.s (in the world, I mean, not in baseball)?
Webwright: your product looks great, I signed up using the email address rescuetime &$ kfischer (@ com, can you bump me up the list or post some invite codes here?
Why the Guy bashing? I've found his blog pretty useful.
"I had no idea YC teams were this competitive with each other."

As far as I've seen, they are not (and, neither of these teams is a YC team...they are YC applicants, along with 400+ other teams). The teams tend to be very well-equipped coming into the game and don't really feel the need to break up other teams before they've had a run at it. When a couple of companies fizzled out after the program, I suspect there was a bit of competition for who would get some of the folks from those no longer existent companies, but I'm sure it was friendly (at least I can't imagine any way it could have been otherwise...everybody is still friendly at the events). Others started working on new ideas of their own rather than joining an existing YC company.
FeedEachOther is a full featured feed reader, like Google Reader or BlogLines. Original Signal shows one set of preselected headlines to everyone on a few topics. It's great at what it does, but it's quite different.
Thumbs up for happy hardcore and acid jazz. I love highly active, fast techno. Anything from the breakbeat, big beat, 2-step, hardcore, happy hardcore, gabba, drum & bass, and jungle subgenres. The problem with rap for me is that the lyrics distract my thinking while coding. Other types of electronic music don't keep me energized.

But when reading something more substantial than, say, looking something up in documentation, silence is excellent.
Cheatsheets to add to your toolbox
Tracking down-time means knowing where your bottlenecks are. If you know your bottlenecks are you can improve cycle time. Improving cycle time by just a few seconds mean massive increases in output.

$50 billion might be a stretch, but it's not far off.

Note: Cycle time is the amount of time it takes to produce a part. It's sort of like the MHz of the manufacturing world. Usually car plants are setup such that there are n manufacturing lines in operation at any given time producing/assembling parts. So you're always at the mercy of the slowest line. It takes months to comission a new line so it's not just a matter of "adding servers" to improve production.
+1 for CLRS. You may run into CLR, but that's an older edition
Why is it, whenever there's an ethical issue on this forum, inevitably, someone steps up and says, "This isn't a question of ethics."

Maybe I'm the one in the wrong place. I certainly hope not. I like it here.

(FWIW: I've been in the "real world of business" since 1979, starting and selling 2 successful start-ups, working on #3. In all that time, nothing has concerned me more than ethical issues. I'd like to think I've been burnt every way possible, but thanks to some of the responses in this forum, now I wonder.)
You might need something one step below CLRS. Try a good CS2 book.

The only algorithms I use regularly at a boring blub coding job is quicksort and binary search. The only data structures I use are hashes, arrays, and binary trees. Other niche data structures like tries, Bloom filters, etc. are useful sometimes but 90% of the time it's a very small handful of techniques you're using.
Drrrrama! Also, tl;dr.

More seriously, one of the few positive things the business world values is clear, concise communication. Get thee to a copy of Strunk and White, post haste.
Most anything Orbital, Sasha and John Digweed - Northern Exposure, most NIN remix / single releases, Any Tool (but mostly Lateralus), Enya, Sarah McLachlan - Remixed or Surfacing, sometimes other stuff of hers, Brian Eno, Yoko Kanno, sometimes Audioslave or APC's first albums, Mushroomhead, TCM's Vegas album, and as others have said, glitchy electronic stuff - I'm especially partial to Download's stuff and some other cEvin Key stuff.
I'm prepared to compete and have to scars to show for it. I compete by doing the right thing and offering better value to my customers, not by a slime-ball back-door gimmicks, like commandeering others' IP, slamming my competitors, and yes, poaching co-founders in a bar.
I'd just like to say that last.fm is probably the best service I've seen in a long time... i wish they had a client for blackberry, then life would be perfect.

last.fm/user/migpwr
I think his repetition of the word stupid, and addressing California/startups/etc. as such, without really backing any of it up, was rather... stupid.

Also, smart does not equate to being overly cautious and paranoid, as it sounds in the way he describes his beloved Michigan. Smart, in my opinion, when referring to the startup scene, is being able to analyze the current trends, approximate which direction societal trends will move, and take calculated risks accordingly.

'Smart' will make us stagnant and if being innovative, creative, and progressive is stupid, then for once in my life, i'd rather pursue stupidity.

On another note, it's nice to see Michigan on the cutting edge and flourishing.
Why not here? Describe your project and your budget in more detail and maybe you'll get lucky...
"Good! Another opportunity for a couple of hackers in a spare bedroom."

Right-O.
Kawasaki and Truemors: The stupidest idea ever? Not anymore.
I found PG's essay on equity put things in some perspective for me in regards to funding. http://www.paulgraham.com/equity.html
I'm not registering to read this.
Building a company in 10 easy steps
My biggest issue with rails is that I don't really understand how the thing works. That bugs me.

It doesn't matter that I've got a fully functional and beautiful website. It bothers me that most of what's going on is happening is some black hole.

To be fair, this is more ruby's fault than rails, as it's a difficult language to parse for my western-aligned and procedural brain.

I find django/python much more satisfactory for this reason alone really.
Previous projects can be a good indicator of coding ability. IIRC, there have been companies funded by YC who simply demonstrated that they could hack.
> Why is it, whenever there's an ethical issue on this forum, inevitably, someone steps up and says, "This isn't a question of ethics."

Because, in this case, it isn't. The article is about a human being, one with free will or some impressive approximation thereof, who received a business proposition.

Another human being is pissed off at the person making the proposition...but the proposition is not his problem. The business he is building and his relationship with his teammate is his problem. The person receiving the proposition may have had some ethics questions to address, like, "What is my responsibility to my teammate and the business we are building?"

The person making the offer was perhaps a bit rude (though his description of the proposition makes it entirely within the bounds of good taste), but not particularly unethical. Nearly every hire you make in the real world is hiring someone away from an existing job. Is it unethical to give someone a better offer? Is it unethical to give someone (who you know to be an employee at IBM or Google or whatever) your business card when you meet them at events and say, "let's have lunch sometime"? Of course not.

Anyway, it's all like a damned soap opera, and the OP made a mistake to post it at all. This isn't college, and nobody cheated on a test.

> Maybe I'm the one in the wrong place. I certainly hope not. I like it here.

A not so subtle way of suggesting that perhaps I'm poisoning the waters with my unethical advice? You'll be fine, as I can't reach through the wires and choke you or anything sinister like that. Unless perhaps you've got a weak heart and respond reflexively to nasty comments like mine, in which case, perhaps a nice hot bath would be more your speed.
Can someone with an account please summarize? I am curious.

Edit: The article basically talks about how Truemors is not as bad as it once was, and is slowly building a better reputation as they learned from some mistakes, like how to keep the content clean and useful. Nothing revolutionary here..
I know you're kind of joking here, but the answer appears to be "yes", you probably could get away with quitting school. It's not like law or medicine where you're useless without the actual degree. Dropping out of whatever degree program you're in seems to be a time honored way to the top in the high tech world (gates, jobs, ellison, allen, dell...)

But do you really want to take that risk? Nobody gets to the top without finishing something. Maybe part of "thinking like an engineer" involves wrapping it all up.
This all seems to be remnants of office politics and fossils of typical bureaucratic behavior. Which is what we're trying to escape from, right?
Has anyone done a study on the effects on random dot domain names like de.licio.us and fav.or.it on users?

For the life of me, it takes forever to verbally explain to someone how to go to delicious. And now, with favorit I even have to remember to tell people to spell "favour" wrong.
I have to agree that CLRS is probably the most thorough, but as a bare introductory book to someone learning on their own (who probably is not currently in a computer science program) I would recommend Introduction to the Design and Analysis of Algorithms by Anany Levitin. Good luck!
I got this from bugmenot
Username	thelover@gmail.com
Password	thelover
I think your product is great and that you can make money now. I would suggest marketing it to companies and corporations since they have multiple computers and a desire to understand computer usage.

If you can get some funding I would suggest

1. Create a CD-Rom that you can mail out, similar to the "Free AOL" cd-roms we all used to get. This will make your product tangable and into the hands of companies that are not tech saavy enough to search you out on the web but do want to track computer usage. (who wouldn't want it, I see this as something that any company would want if they knew about it).

2.Here is a mailing list program http://www.completefinancialmarketing.com/-p-284.html so you can reach all of these customers that would never find you otherwise. When I used to fix computers for a living, I meet all sorts of companies that spend a lot of money on IT and the company owners were really non-technical. You can't really reach these people with web marketing but you can directly and from my experiences they would be very open to this type of product.

3. If your program doesn't track multiple computers, that would be really key. I only looked at it briefly. Essentially you would need a master account that can see the stats from multiple accounts. Not really hard, you probably already have that.
But, that means you don't have a story. You strung me along expecting a payoff, and there was none. It's more than a bit rude. ;-)
I think Paul Graham may have an uncommon definition of smart. Recall that he has a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard.
Guy Kawasaki: Can't spot a good investment, but he can run his mouth
I agree with CLRS.

It might be good to look into the mathematical side of the algorithms though, so that you know how they work inside. This way, you can manipulate the algorithms and fine tune it to something you want later on.
Server error!

The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request. Either the server is overloaded or there was an error in a CGI script.

If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.
Error 500
utilitymill.com
Tue Oct 2 19:07:13 2007
Apache/2.0.59 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.59 OpenSSL/0.9.8c DAV/2 mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 PHP/5.2.3 SVN/1.4.4
good point, but i still think your site would a lot cooler if you could change the ui to a newspaper format like origsignal's layout

it's the same reason why i don't use g reader

...the more i check out your site, the more I like it... it's just that one pet peeve of mine that keeps me from dumping original signal for your site
That's interesting... I specifically chose baroque vs. other forms of classical music because it is more repetitive. Bach is way easier for me to zone out with than Beethoven. ;)
What do you need the money for?

Employees, Patents, Legal, Technology?

Marketing?

What sort of conversion rates do you expect with your user base? It looks like right now its a free service, and if 1% convert to paid buyers at 10-50$ a year, thats only a few thousand dollars a year. How big is you're expected market?

Are you planing on selling to the enterprise market? If so do you need cash for insurance, contract liability?
I would find this useful, hopefully you will do a linux version soon.
Best of luck,
Print link (no registration):
http://www.mercurynews.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/pr...
I don't think your comments were nasty and don't accuse anyone of poisoning anything. And I don't feel like I'm responding emotionally on this issue (although it may appear that way.) I just wonder sometimes why 2 intelligent people will look at the same data and have responses 180 degrees apart.

As a born nerd, I spent the first half of my life in a world I didn't belong in, being dumped on every step of the way. The world has finally changed for people like me (and you, I presume). Now I LOVE the thrill of competing! When it's fair and right, by offering better value. So when pussies who can't compete fairly resort to underhanded tactics, I take exception and fire right back. Between the eyes.

That's how I interpreted this incident. Can't code? Get a coder. Steal mine right out from under me (if you can), and deal with me. Period. I understand that you don't see it that way, but don't understand why. I'll just leave it at that.

And yes, I think I will have that nice hot bath tonight. Thank you.
Yeah, it's still in the prototype stage. I'll see what error it hit. I'm guessing it's something related to your trying to call the print statement 999,900 times :-)

When working correctly it should kill running code after 2 seconds of runtime. (Perhaps it needs a maximum response size too)
By the way, I haven't failed to notice that everyone except me is getting voted up in this "little debate". Kinda scary. I'm adamant on this issue, not because of emotion, but because I think it's that important. I really don't care what technology you use, but I do care how you treat other people. I've seen what happens too many times when people don't play "by the rules" (whatever that means to you).

FWIW, I don't think either party in this "dispute" emerges smelling very good. We should all just get back to hacking. Get beat in the marketplace fair and square? Try something else. That's the beauty here. Everyone can win.
Thanks. I've read The Goal.

My point is that Chrysler itself was recently sold for less than $10 billion. Maybe Cerberus bought because they knew about this code that was written in a day and now they are going to turn them into a $50 billion dollar software company?

Look out SAP & Oracle...
Ballmer Calls Facebook A Fad?
And the transfer window closed two days ago!

(football ... uh, I mean .... "soccer" joke, sorry).
Isn't it amazing how their registration shit is easily defeated? :D
- Whatever is on radio 4 (bbc.co.uk/radio4/)
- Jungletrain.com
Judging from the product tour on your website, I'd say get some funding and go after the enterprise market.

After reading your bio, I really wanted to meet you. If you're in the Bay Area and want to get lunch sometime, let me know.
How are you ensuring that the input is safe? I just tried `import sys;sys.exit(0)` and got an error message thankfully :)
I listen to 202.fm and c9radio.fr while coding.

If I listen to something local to my disk, I get distracted wondering what's coming up next, or otherwise fiddling with the order of play. If that's not in my control, I don't think about it.
I can't wait for the next episode!
I'm one of the 9.6%... On the iPhone now though
Agreed. The problem is, hackers don't tend to even have access to this type of problem because you need access to the very real environment of a large factory floor. And, even if you did build a better solution, there are relatively few customers, so selling is really about selling into large corporate bureaucracies, not getting someone to download a cool new plug-in. This type of selling is very expensive, and they will not buy from a couple of hackers in a spare beadroom
"FriendFeed aggregates all of your activity from the sites you choose using web crawling technologies similar to those used by search engines. For most sites, all you need to provide FriendFeed is your username, and the FriendFeed crawler will automatically find and broadcast all of the actions you perform on that site. For other sites, or for services that contain private data and require special forms of authentication, FriendFeed takes advantage of the APIs provided by those sites to collect your activity.

From their FAQ: http://friendfeed.com/about/faq#how
I decided to break my rule of "no registering to read" and immediately regretted it. They demand that you pick a password with numbers and letters! To read a newspaper article!
Calling him immature isn't a good way to come off mature. Making fun of him regarding hurt feelings and hugging isn't a good idea either. The comments about his mommy were in bad taste.
I told you too much already. :-) Several clever grammars were written. If you want any more, you have to buy Chrysler.
You may want to finish the article. :-)
Right. Now, change "billion" to "million". Find a little work in one of the thousands of small businesses in your neighborhood, and within 2 weeks you'll find yourself screaming one of two things, either, "Who wrote this &^#$^#&!" or "I can do way better than this."

Congratulations. You just found the basis for a viable start-up.
This episode was an enormous mistake. I think that both of you have a very poor understanding of how business must be conducted.

Whats more, the "accuser" is immature in the most troubling way. I could not imagine working with him, least of all as his "hacker".
Go to the source "Art of Computer Programming" Get your hands dirty with MIX
yanni
Startups with offices: what about phones?
So there are all these expensive business-plan phone systems with all kinds of features. Do you actually end up needing all that crap? What kind of phone system does a small web startup really need?
give me 2 months and I could do away with AOP by showing how (comparatively) trivial it is to implement in Lua
I read the whole thing before I posted. My comment still stands as far as his uses of 'smart' and 'stupid.'
That was my reasoning for finishing college, and in hindsight was probably the right choice. Remember that Gates, Allen, Jobs, and Dell had all started and run profitable businesses in high school (traffic counters, payroll software, blue boxes, and stamps, respectively). If you have that kind of background, you really don't need college. If you don't, you might want to build it up before attempting a startup.
Mobile plan.

Free nights and weekends.
"or maybe just happy" - kurt cobain
Anyone else annoyed at these "I'm not a programmer, no that's too hard, make me a programmer the easy way" posts?
A New Look for Outlook (on Xobni)
The other guy at least confined it to his blog and didn't post his dirty laundry here...
Taming? Using python is like petting a kitten.
I'm not sure the O.P. fits that profile.

Also, none of the books recommended here fall into the "Learn Blub in 21 Days" category.
thanks for getting that link.