skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For each name you want to try, follow these guidelines:
1) say it out loud to ten people and ask them to spell it

2) keep talking to them for about a minute, then ask them if they remember it

3) write it down for ten people and ask them to pronounce it

If you get less than 90% right on #1 or 3, your name will get lost in translation and people won't be able to find it even if they want to (or, you'll have to make a lot more impressions before people start remembering you). If you get bad results (probably won't be as high because of peoples' memories) on #2, your name it probably to long to remember or not differentiated enough.

Rules to Remember:

1) Easy to spell correctly if heard

2) Easy to say if read

3) short = easy

4) real words = easy (but usually conflicts with #3 because of availability)

5) Don't be blatantly about your business, but related and give hints (Xobni and Auctomatic are good examples of doing this right - much better than emailsocialnetwork.com or auctiontools.com)

6) Getting a domain name that doesn't follow these should be considered a marketing expense, because you'll have to make more impressions in order to get planted in people's consciousness.

Here's my take on some YC company names

Loopt - probably lost some people who thought it was looped, but only 5 letters and one syllable so it's easy

Weebly - weird word but hard to get wrong, good name

Xobni - like Loopt, probably lost some people looking for Zobny, Zobni, but the "inbox" thing makes it easy to remember

Wufoo - probably the hardest one (on this list) to get right, but being short is a virtue

Auctomatic, octopart - longer names that are made of real words are easier to remember and spell
"breaking into a top secret military safe during a war (or at any time) is a federal crime, and that exceptions cannot be made based upon our personal preferences in celebrity scientists"

Right, because laws are laws, and must be blindly followed, always, without regard to circumstances or logic. Surely, it would have been beneficial to hang one of the people instrumental in developing the atomic bomb for exposing flaws in the security at Los Alamos.
Those essays (especially the ones written after Viaweb and before YC) can be inspiring if you're stuck in a cube at Big Company, Inc. and neither your managers nor your fellow programmers are interested in doing anything else with their lives.

That doesn't mean everything Graham writes about is as compelling (the essay on philosophy is an example), though, and you're right to point out that it can go too far.
Just because they read it doesn't mean they're going to execute well. I'm pretty sure if you did all of these things as well as 37s, you would stand out by a mile. I'm sure I would too (currently I'm too anonymous to even register).
A kill file.
Hmm.. Not sure what did has to do with Hacker News... How about keeping this for one for reddit (or even Digg?)
Albert Einstein didn't understand the concept of hero worship until be befriended Charlie Chaplin. When they were together at the premiere of City Lights, a crowd rushed their car to get a better look.

A confused Einstein asked, "What does it all mean?"

Chaplin replied, "Nothing. Absolutely nothing."
Search this site with site:news.ycombinator.com hosting - it's been covered extensively in the past.
layeredtech.com has been good
Weird that they put the factory in San Jose. I can see not outsourcing to China or similar faraway locales but I imagine you could save a lot just by moving it out of the bay area.
You're right.

Here's a complete database-driven web application in Scheme:

http://brlewis.com/map.brl

Try the "Show Source" link there.

The same language is in use at my day job. When we hired somebody else to work on it here, he was writing production code his first day. He left to work for the Obama campaign. Someone in house with prior PHP experience took over, and likewise was writing acceptable production code in a day.
Google talk bots
The Lisp-1 vs Lisp-2 issue is really a matter of personal preference. Going to Lisp-1 gains you nicer higher-order function syntax, but costs you twice as many namespace collisions. It depends what you want.

Scheme define vs CL defun is a total non-issue. I'm glad he discovered that.

I program in Scheme all the time and rarely use call/cc.
He's not only a phenomenal teacher, but also an extremely nice guy. I had him as a recitation instructor (imagine that -- Walter Lewin teaching a freshman physics section, rather than being the main lecturer!) and for years after, he would e-mail the people from our section about interesting physics news, meteor showers, and the like.
Yahoo and Google went ahead and removed the other's entry from their "top terms" lists.
To some extent, he's right that GPU processing power will get to a point where pumping more pixels will not be discernible to the human eye. But that doesn't mean that there aren't more transformative steps you can insert in rendering computer graphics to make it look more realistic. Convincing fluid and smoke dynamics come to mind.
I highly recommend http://www.pickydomains.com/

Cheap and it worked like a charm, some really great suggestions.

(Admittedly, you're looking for a name but sometimes that and a domain are interdependent)
Were he hanged, there would have been hundreds of direct deaths

Well, you're looking forward from a past point of time, and that shouldn't be done. Actually hanging someone probably wouldn't be a good idea. It depends on the circumstances: If he made it clear what he was doing, a loss of clearance would have been more appropriate.

Of course, in the back of my mind are a lot of hypotheticals--using the bomb was partly strategic, ie, to scare the Soviets. That didn't work, partly because of the spying. North Korea and Red China were tragedies of the highest order, and the lost nuke secrets were a part of that game...
It would take more than a technical solution -- currently many people who handle luggage are not really accountable to passengers. (They're probably not paid too well, either.)

I learned this the hard way when my wife (foolishly, to be sure) packed her engagement ring in checked-in luggage. Everything but the ring arrived intact.
Code's Worst Enemy
How Your Hiring Techniques attract Losers
This article suggests that as we seek to hire people based on rigid criteria, we simply reinforce the cementing of our own entrenched position. It shows us how to innovate...
If you are 'printing' the panels, it is hardly a labour intensive factory. I imagine it is mostly automated, with a few engineers and forklift drivers working there.

I also imagine if they dropped that much money on a factory, they considered building it elsewhere but likely constructed it there to save on shipping costs, etc.
Don't forget also that after the US implements a cap & trade system the value to the consumer will increase. The next attempt is going to be spring 2008, but if that doesn't pass it might get pushed off until 2009. But every single climate bill is based around the cap & trade system, and it's clear that one of them is going to pass very soon, if not in six months then in a year and six months, but soon.
I am / was, for enterprise (advergaming for expositions and such). Now I'm getting interested by the computer vision world...
As upscale home complexes add great chefs, more buyers are biting
"What we found during our research for the project is that San Franciscans are obsessed with three things: food, wine and fitness,"
In many ways this is a beta production run so having high quality staff working closely with the design team is more important than labor costs. Right now they are more focused on moving product than lowering labor costs. After the bugs are worked out they will probably move to some distant location but for now it's cheaper to manufacture this stuff in the US. Anyway, "it had orders for its first 18 months of manufacturing capacity." so they are probably going to keep the plant running for a while even after opening production facilities in other countries.
"Easy access" makes sense, but even then, depending on how often they need it, you would have think plunking it down further off towards Sacramento would have saved some cash, given even land prices in the bay area.

Oh well, it's pretty cool in any case.
Journalists, Bloggers Have a Sorry History at Startups
Coding Horror: Nobody Cares What Your Code Looks Like
Interesting project: a software that plays Tetris with a webcam
I agree with the high quality staff issue (it's still Silicon Valley and some people remember how to do high-tech manufacturing) but I think they also wanted to be close to potential customers (rich companies that use tons of power and are flush with cash). Not to make deliveries to customers easier, but to make it easier for people to visit them and say "ooh, solar cell factory!". Plus their VCs probably didn't want to drive to Sacramento
The secret to winning at rock, paper, scissors
I just watched one of the videos and wow, he is a pretty awesome teacher. I generally can't stand studying physical sciences, but I'd be very interested in watching more of his lecturers.
The thing he doesn't get is that you can always have more smaller polygons, rendering a single 3D cube is trivial in any resolution/framerate you may want, the problem is that polygons interact/intersect and that takes some real computing power.

Which reminds me of a UF cartoon from my youth: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20000615&mode=c...
Meet QVM, the new Tamarin VM contributed to Mozilla (written in Forth)
Hell, I learned Python over a weekend, while building a project for a client (nothing like getting paid to learn a great new language). Not my best code obviously but it just flowed so naturally. The closest thing to poetry or pseudo code I've ever been able to compile(py2exe).
I've always had an entreprenurial / always-doing-something spirit, but I do owe my decision to get the hell out of a cube to Paul Graham's essays.

He's not a hero to me and I don't worship him but I still am quite glad he's around.
Don't we elect the greatest common divisor every four years or so?
A programming language for 2010
Hate to take some of the depth out of his well written article but it could be that people of varying experience and confidence find it easy and reassuring to lean on a well known mentor or hero as a way to prevent absolute failure in the eyes of others and maybe themselves.
I've been lucky enough to get to know Paul a little. He invited me to take part in the first MIT Spam Conference in 2003 and I've seen him on and off since then. I don't think hero worship is appropriate, but I think Paul should be celebrated for a few things: sunny personality, good writing, openness, curiosity. There are a lot of people in the computer industry with difficult personalities, who can't communicate in writing, who are fixated on a particular technology. Paul isn't like that. Those things make him worth looking up to.
The company in Germany that is buying the first run of panels for their megawatt solar power station gets my kudos for using their landfill for a good purpose after it's full. I'd like to see more companies use innovative thinking like that to find a use for otherwise worthless land.
Cool idea, but I'm having an IRC chatbot flashback.
Proper seperation of functions into modules makes the namespace collision issue a non-issue. Now, you might consider the fact that the Scheme community is divided and the lack of a standard module system an issue.

edit s/standard module is/standard module system/
This reminds me of the lifestyle of the rich and famous in the late 1800s. The well to do, like Andrew Carnegie, would often live in luxury hotels instead of private residences for reasons exactly like this -- they had all sorts of great ameneties in the buildings, such as barber shops, book stores, news stands, and, of course, restaurants. Looks like that style of living is beginning to make a comeback.
Q: What would you do differently if you could do it all over again?

Reddit: Stick with Lisp. (...)

http://notelab.infogami.com/startupschool2006
Latest News about Affiliate Programmes
"Going back to our crazed Tetris game, imagine that you have a tool that lets you manage huge Tetris screens that are hundreds of stories high. In this scenario, stacking the pieces isn't a problem, so there's no need to be able to eliminate pieces. This is the cultural problem: they don't realize they're not actually playing the right game anymore." Well Said...

On another note, has anyone here played with Groovy? I played it for a while, and I am not sure why there seems to be so much negativity about it.
Then again, there's people like Michael Moritz and Nick Denton out there.

Whether or not you like those guys, they're pretty successful.
5 letter was pretty convenient....I almost bought a few domains :P
A French Twist in Silicon Valley
Facebook Killer Feature Arrives (LinnkedIn Killer Feature)
Actually your analogy is very accurate and just as after you reach a certain level of fluency in a new language you stop thinking about what you are going to say and how to compose the sentence you want, and just say it.
I've used both types of Lisp extensively, and I'm now convinced Lisp2 is a mistake. There's not really any downside to not making that mistake. I program daily in a Lisp1 (Arc) and I don't get any more name collisions than I did using CL.
Another fatuous attempt at scorekeeping. Everyone has a sorry history at startups. It's a simple bias that focuses your memory on the rare successes.
I hate to bring up opportunity cost here but uh...
Blog about the best Affiliate programmes in the UK
An argument for learning Python:

http://xkcd.com/353/
Is Digg really worth $300m?
They will make solar cheaper than coal , and manufacture in San Jose ?! WOW, but its still manufacturing the actual infrastructure and not the operational(daily) costs of placing it on the grid.

I saw an article on wave power a few weeks ago which breaks down the structure as follows:
Coal (3 cents) kilowatt hour
Natural gas (4 to 5 cents) kilowatt hour.
Wave (5 to 8 cents) [long-term goal] for kilowatt hour.
Offshore wind turbines (15 cents) kilowatt hour.
* Solar (18 or more cents, depending on the circumstances.) kilowatt hour.

Producing at lesser than 3 cents seems astonishing, considering this last article pegs solar at 18 cents/kwhr, not to mention the leasing and operational costs of having manufacturing in the U.S

Here is the original article on Wave power, which is set to go live in California by 2012 http://www.news.com/Wave-power-to-go-commercial-in-Californi...

The N.Y times article cites "the first solar panel manufacturer to be able to profitably sell solar panels for less than $1 a watt. With a $1-per-watt panel," he said, "it is possible to build $2-per-watt systems."

According to the Energy Department cites: 'building a new coal plant costs about $2.1 a watt, plus the cost of fuel and emissions, he said.

Its interesting how they play with numbers, the N.Y times numbers on solar are for building plants, the other source on news.com is for kw/hour indicating operational costs for putting it on the grid.
The official fb blog on this: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=7831767130
http://www.deepsblog.com/2007/08/29/world-war-ii-rock-paper-...
No mention of library support?

True, not much library support for CL, but even less for Scheme, no?

The other thing I like about CL is the no-nonsense defmacro. I don't get the whole "hygiene" thing, but it seems like one of those "it's good for you, it builds character" things that tries to keep you from shooting your foot off, and if you're really worried about that you'll be using Java or Haskell anyway. Or am I missing something here?

Otherwise agreed. Lisp1 is a clear win and efficient, functional-style recursion is more beautiful than the mess of iteration operators in CL (although loop is beautiful in its own demented way).
Duke Nukem Forever teaser trailer to be released
Top 10 stories of 2007: Age of realignment
In certain societies and cultures, it's common to have a "master", "guru", or mentor to help out a young apprentice. It's actually an expected way of life. We don't seem to have that in the US, or at least, it's not taught as a necessity growing up. Paul, among others, fill this void to young, energetic, tech inclined students. You can call it hero worship, or simply some form of mentorship/apprenticeship. If anything, the celebrity around PG signals a deep desire for good, honest mentors.
I sincerely doubt this is going to kill LinkedIn. I've actually stopped using Facebook because the signal/noise was all noise. LinkedIn is far more professional and just being able to group my Facebook friends isn't going to do much unless I can make Facebook show different profiles to different groups of people. But, you know, why bother? LinkedIn works great for professional contacts, can't see any reason to try to embed LinkedIn inside Facebook.
Eco-boat powered by human fat attempts round the world speed record
"but pretty much every bit I have seen (which is not that much) has nothing to do with functional (in the "strict" sense)"

CL is the ultimate "multi-paradigm" language. You can program imperatively to your heart's content with progn. CLOS+MOP is perhaps the world's most advanced object oriented system. Meta-programming taken to what would be considered absurd levels in other languages with defmacro.

Now, your code will flow more nicely if written in a functional style. But you are definitely right that CL does not restrict you to functional programming.
Reading the comments, it's not actually written in Forth.
Well, it's true that sometimes projects fail because people uncritically follow the advice of respected authorities.

On the other hand, sometimes projects fail because nobody respects authority. Every single decision, from the compiler to the database vendor to the lunch menu, is challenged by the free-thinkers on the team and then debated to death. Eighteen months go by, and the software doesn't ship.

Sometimes projects fail because everyone loses the plot. Determined to avoid being trapped by the constraints of a standard methodology, but unable to find the time or the talent to develop, document, and teach a methodology of their own, the leaders fall back on the classic IT solution: handwaving. There are no established authorities or written specs, and processes like QA or release engineering evolve from week to week and are passed on by word of mouth. Eventually, the one person who knew how everything worked accepts another job, everything falls apart, and the software doesn't ship.

Sometimes projects fail because the people on the team are demoralized. Without a successful company to model themselves on, they fear that they've gone down a dead end. Without a community or a written argument to back them up, they are hesitant about proposing their new ideas, all of which sound stupid. ("Yes, we should write tests for code that hasn't been written yet." "Yes, we should ship version 0.5 even without those 'critical' features, to start getting feedback.") The employees sit around in their cubes, playing Tetris and looking forward to happy hour, and the software doesn't ship.

And, of course, sometimes projects fail because the team was badly put together in the first place. Anxious to avoid hiring "hero worshipers" who "do not think for themselves", the boss doesn't ask the interviewees what they think of Paul Graham, or the Joel test, or XP, or Martin Fowler, or Bruce Tate, or DHH, or Seth Godin. Five weeks later, the "team" consists of a Java developer who secretly prefers Rails, admires 37signals, and wants to work as the back-end guy at a YC-style startup; an Oracle-certified .NET developer who wants to be a VP at a $100-million IT consulting firm; a designer who knows a little PHP and wants to work part-time; and a marketing person who used to work for Procter and Gamble. These folks can't agree on anything, and the software doesn't ship.

So, on balance, I think that so-called "hero worship" is pretty useful, and the IT industry needs more and better heroes. (Though I prefer the term "leaders".)
Oh please. It's not about pixel resolution. It's about the amount of realism in each pixel. Pixar and FX houses render frames at the same 1080p resolutions - but they do them at over 2-10 hours PER FRAME. The GPU is getting better, but the artistic and realistic quality of images will probably always be in front of the technology.

You could make this same, lame argument about CPUs, but we've always used those limits too.
7 Must Reads for Developers Turned Entrepreneurs
Umm, they don't make GPU's for 30 inch monitors yet. Resolution is always increasing. How long until a GPU can run a full wall display at 300DPI?

I think they've got a lot of work ahead of them.
Any chance this was caused by the Fed raising rates too quickly and killing the housing market? That's a theory I've heard, but personally disagree with.
I suggest you run a randomized test using Google keyword ads. Try different names taking you to some page and see which ones get the highest click through. Ian Ayres used this technique to find the title for his last book. Seems like a cheap and effective way to do it to me.
Most search data looks like this becuase the long tail is so massively long and the intersection of common terms falls to simple, broad, and popular terms.
Well now everyone knows that rock is the most popular (suggesting you should throw paper), meaning scissors is the best way to start, the smart money will move to throwing rock, which of course means the really smart will start with paper, so to really get the edge you throw scissors. No, wait...

Unfortunately the NS source article is paywalled, so we miss the part where they give the (probably small) improvement in odds that scissors (currently) gives.

The interesting part about RPS for me is the evolutionary/ecological/game-theoretical implications, "Some of the male lizards (call their type "rock") use force, invading the territory of fellow males to mate with females. Others ("paper") favor deception, waiting until females are unguarded and sneaking in. Still others ("scissors") work by cooperation, joining together to protect one another's females. The three types of lizard... are locked in a cyclical sort of standoff. "

[http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/magazine/09rockpaper.html?...]

Also: [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071001145022.ht...]
Crux:

> They want a hero -- somebody more than a mentor.

This is the problem. Grow up and understand that nobody -- not Paul Graham, not DHH, not your guru-like boss that rebuilt an AIX filesystem with 'ed' -- nobody is perfect. And realize that no one can make your decisions but you.

Then there is no problem. Decide -- don't follow -- and you're fine. Slavishly hanging on every word of another, imperfect human being will always get you in trouble, and it's no quality that any would-be leader should embody.

If you want to follow someone else, go back to your cubicle!
Microsoft not going down without a fight
Who did you get to do the website layout?
I'm looking to get some logo work and web site layout who do you guys recommend?
Sounds way, way too good to be true. This would be like saying you found a way to make nuclear fusion work.
The World Needs Another Photo-Sharing Site
No. But theoretically my employer is happier that I'm not distracted by random posts.