skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He should get a computer.

Maybe a nice IBM PC that runs DOS... ;-)
I dunno. I think taking advice from successful business people is hit-or-miss. Sometimes they're successful because they're good, and other times because they were at the right place at the right time and just got lucky.
I was not making any claims with respect to what is best for the economy. My only concern was to point out the (imo) flawed argumentation, that is, the false logic.
I am thinking in more abstract terms, not making any claims about todays actual food production. Historically, I think most of the time food shortage was caused by climate problems (bad weather, eroding soils, etc). I just wanted to make the point that the market will not always be able to provide what everybody needs, simply because the market can not provide more than what is available.

Interesting point about the compensation rates, but I'd like to think more about the issue before accepting the argument (note that I don't claim that there is a shortage of programmers).
Yeah, I don't get it either, nailer. Massive insecurity, I guess.

I routinely notice when someone is smarter than me, or has a better memory than me, or who can visualize complex logical structures better than me. It sucks (for me, in this instance), but that's just the way it is.
That sounds like a quote from The Secret.
Last time I did that, it spent all its time playing video games! :-(
> Find someone else who is asking the same thing.

No way! You're competing for the same resource: a cofounder! If he finds one first, then you're screwed!

;-)
Developer scalability competition
Whatever gave you the idea that SimpleDB was Dynamo? Werner has said quite explicitly that Dynamo is not and will not be exposed directly to potentially hostile users.
"Comet is a giant hack" -- explanation of various real-time web app techniques
What a strange thing to do to the Ascent of Mount Carmel. http://biblestudy.churches.net/CCEL/J/JOHN_OF_/ASCENT/MOUNT_...
Mobile Phones on Planes: Good or Bad?
Data & Text only, or I think the rate of in-flight violence will go up!
Problem: if you have a "data but no voice" network with bandwidth and latency low enough to make web apps work well, someone will be able to implement voice on top of it.

Maybe it would be enough to make uploads slow.
Huh? Is this meant as an example for "living in a bubble"?
Google to tackle Wikipedia with new knowledge service
The Non-Relational DB Strikes Back
> No problem getting in up in my IDE.

Do you suffer IDE-ED? Has your co-founder been complaining about your performance? Order the all natural Meg@Code today and become the young stud uber hacker you were in your 20s!
What's the problem with cell ph...WHAT?...I DON'T KNOW!...HOLD ON A MINUTE!...SEAN???...OK!...OK!...SO WHAT IF EVERYONE ELSE IS SLEEPING...GIVE ME THE WEST COAST FIGURES...SEAN???...SEAN???...OK!...NO! NO! NO!... DO NOT LET JEAN HANDLE THAT!!!...Yes, I'll have a diet coke...NO, SEAN, NOT YOU!!!...AND MAKE SURE FRED KNOWS ABOUT OUR 3 O'CLOCK...What, my seat belt? OK...NO! NOT YOU SEAN!...I WAS TALKING TO THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT!...OK...WHERE WERE WE?...OH YES THE MURPHY CONTRACT...SEAN???...SEAN???

Who needs terrorists?
Might be useful to check out some of the PHP code your interviewer has written himself.

http://code.google.com/u/irma.olguin.jr/

http://bookbuster.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

http://ridiculouspysch.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/
Google's Sacca: VC funds are too big
The article said the numbers will be published in the print edition.
(jump 'yc-news 'shark)
Is this burnout? Why?
I know what I have to do, but I can't do it. For example, I have planned to install the pebble blog engine on my server. It's presumably very easy: ssh to server, make directory for content writable for user tomcat, edit location in pebble properties file, upload pebble directory to server, edit server.xml to point to pebble.

Why can't I do it? I feel like the people in the Bunuel movie who can't leave the party.

And the blog is just an example. The only coding I managed to do recently is some project euler problems to experiment with Erlang.
What gave me the idea that SimpleDB was powered by Dynamo technology:
High-availability Key-value store, eventual consistency, targets small objects (< 1MB) that fits SimpleDB item restrictions (max 256 attribute/value pairs and each value < 1KB), and made by the same company. The web service would have to add authentication, enhanced querying, etc.

I'm not on a first name basis with Mr. Vogels, so all I can see is the paper and his blog :) On Oct 2, he said Dynamo wasn't directly exposed as a web service. That doesn't preclude Dynamo technology (or related, tweaked-for-web-service software) from being used today for SimpleDB. I think all the Amazon web services have an internal version that's separated from us riff-raff. (I believe that after talking with some Amazon folks at an AWS meeting.) But you are right that it's speculation on my part that the Dynamo paper describes any aspect of SimpleDB.
Facebook's generational challenge
I can't see anyone at success mountain. I think there should be one guy there.
Please, go to a doctor as soon as possible, maybe you are near a burnout and s/he can avoid it.
This kind of thing is pretty common, especially when you have multiple projects and you are in love with one.

If the problem is you are thinking too much in your head, open notepad and simply type out everything your head is saying=) Always works for me.

Last October I was experiencing something similar to what you describe and my life had virtually stopped. Friend of mine suggested I start a "secret" blog on blogspot. I wrote 3-4 super long posts rambling and clearing my head. The next day I got the idea for my start-up and had the best two months of my life in Nov. and Dec. '06.
I was using Ubuntu + Firefox, and I have Flash 7 on that computer because of a bad Flash 9 installation over a previous Flash (sometimes Flash 9 opens, most of the times it's Flash 7; when I entered at your site it was Flash 7).

No wonder it didn't work on that computer... don't worry about it...
Consider putting together a list of all the "Google Interview Questions", give yourself an hour to write a brief solution to as many as you can and then ask someone you respect to review your answers. You could start with these

http://tinyurl.com/3xtxa3

http://tinyurl.com/hpg7v

http://tinyurl.com/2fpl6y

http://tinyurl.com/2jqtgh

I had a high school math teacher who gave tests with more questions then anyone could ever answer. The top score for the class on a 100 point test would often be around 8 and the average around 4. Everyone in the class learned how to deal with situations where you couldn't possibly answer all the questions perfectly. The high scorers were often people who provided partial solutions to many questions instead of perfect ones to a few.
I feel the same way about at least one or two of my courses every semester. Case in point - I have my linear algebra final tonight, I know what I need to be studying and how to study for it, but I just can't make myself go to the library.
Actually, I was just trying to be precise. I think market != needs and I was giving some examples... in the best of the cases, all needs are potential markets, but you haven't markets for all needs. And, what is more important and what was my original comment: not all needs generate interesting markets for you (because of tech possibilities, as you said, because of costs, because of logistics, etc).

I can think of all kind of needs: a google maps with 2d shading would make it fun for kids (to say something stupid). But they wouldn't pay for it, it would be very expensive to do unless you are google, and it would probably be expensive _even_ if you are google (because the raw data are photos and no 3d info excepting some selected places), etc etc etc. That's not an interesting need if you look from the market perspective... but if you fall in the trap "anything useful for anybody is worth doing" you might fall in the trap of creating that kind of worthless project.
My point exactly: let new users see only the submissions of old users, and voila! you have the classic reddit again between us.

Somebody at the reddit thread for this subject did propose the same thing there...
So it seems...
Hang out at the comp. sci. dept of the best uni around you.
This is really simple but it works really well for me.

I write the things I want to do today on a notecard and then cross them out as I do them.
I'll need a co-founder to help put this excellent idea in motion.
Ditto. I'm sitting in the university library. Linear Algebra final in 1.5 hours. And I'm reading Hacker News...
(Wow, I think I wrote a comment too long for news.YC to process. I'm going to break it up and post it as replies to itself.)

It varies a lot depending on your hiring circumstances. I was hired on the spot, before the interview, because it was for an internship and I came highly recommended by a friend of the chief architect. Then when I applied to the same company for a full-time position, I had an offer on-the-spot based on my internship. OTOH, when we hired a more senior guy, he went through about 6 rounds of interviews over 3-4 months, including programming tests and full interviews with the rest of the staff.

Here's what I looked for when I was interviewing candidates who had no prior relationship with the company. (And keep in mind that I'm far from the best interviewer, and more experienced interviewers may have more creative questions):

Expect questions about each prior project that you've listed on your resume. The resume tells me what you've been involved with; during the interview, I'm going to want to find out:

1.) What precisely was your involvement? Did you write small submodules while someone else stitched them together, or did you come up with the whole architecture? Maintenance or new development? Did you have "people yell at you" responsibility?

2.) What technologies did you use (if not listed on your resume)? This includes things like your IDE, source code management system, and bugtracker. This actually wouldn't affect my "hire or don't hire" decision much (though I want to see that you at least know what IDEs, source control, and bugtracking are), but I want to know the information so that if you are hired you can get up to speed as quickly as possible.

3.) What challenges and dead-ends did you face, and how did you resolve them?

4.) Did it enter production, and how did customers respond to it?

5.) Was it a team or individual project? Many interviewees assume that the right answer is "team" and try to make some of their solo efforts sound like team projects ("Well, I had my friend helping, and there were these classmates..."), but really I like to see both. There are aspects to solo projects that are in some ways harder than group efforts. (And of course, the point is to see what you've really done and not what you think the interviewer wants to hear you've done...)
My first few interviews, I asked "language trivia" questions, usually about simple standard library calls or concurrency issues (I assume they know the basic syntax, and if they don't I can catch it when they write code). I moved away from these in my later interviews, though, because I found they didn't really tell me anything interesting. The standard libs in most languages are too big for anyone to know them all, so this is really testing how well their experience matches up with yours, and that's not often that relevant for the job.

I'm going to ask why you want the job. The reason for this is that I've found passion is the best predictor of job performance (remember the senior software engineer who went through 3-4 months of interviews? he turned out to be a much better programmer than me, at least at this particular job, because he cared about the project so much more). Don't bullshit me with vague answers; you're not really doing yourself any favors if you apply for a job you don't really want. But if you really want to work at a company because you believe in what they're doing, say that - your passion comes through how you speak and not necessarily what you say.

I don't ask this myself, but many people who have interviewed me have: "How comfortable are you playing many different roles?" In startups, you'll be doing this a lot - the job you're hired for is probably not what you'll be doing in six months. Be sure you're comfortable with this before applying.

I also look for evidence that the candidate has done some research about us in their answers (and questions!) throughout the interview. It's a big plus if you don't just want a job, but want this job.
> Why can't I do it? I feel like the people in the Bunuel
> movie who can't leave the party.

I got to exactly this stage when I was working on my own projects last year. I was excited about them in concept but lost the ability to do work. I decided to move to a city with dull, predictable work and better wages in order to re-motivate myself and reduce mental stress. It has mostly worked - I've saved up a lot of cash this year and am now getting back into my projects. But whereas I thought it would take three months to get there, it was more like ten or eleven in the end but I'm back in form now and have resigned.

Last weekend I decided I needed a better backup strategy and just did it. This time last year I just would have felt extra stress at the prospect of it, and then not done it.

Here are the big factors I found:

1) Exercise and health. I have long-term back and shoulder problems. Since moving to london I've got into semi-regular exercise (still don't do enough) and have seen improvements this year with help from a physio. Being in regular exercise makes everything about life better, including those times where you settle down to do some work.

2) Bad goals leads to mental stress. I spent way too much time working on goals that were too distant from my project. Now I'm setting myself easy goals, and whever anything seems not quite easy I refuse to do it unless I can find a way to make it easy.

3) Having a well-defined home-life where you can have a clean house, and a simple spread of food available so that you have variety but don't have to think too hard when you go shopping. I've turned doing the dishes and ironing into relaxing, therapeutic exercises - works for me. There's nothing quite so simple and delighting as sweeping a wooden floor and having it clean at the end.

If you've never had a burnout before, it's probably worth seeing a councilor or a doctor just to talk through it with them. I find that I generally avoid talking about my problems because I was brought up in an environment where people who whinged were just "attention-seeking". But if I see someone where I don't give a damn what they think of me, and where I paying good money to sort out a problem, then my reticence goes.

In my experience, burnout is a curve, and once you've got to the point you're at now it requires dealing with and gets worse before it plateaus and gets better. If you're mentally exhausted it can be hard to build a plan for dealing with it, also. The authority of a plan defined by someone else for me to follow helps me in these circumstances.
Tell at least one of your users that you're going to do it. Then you'll do it.
Not really nice to hear about somebody else through the same, really. I can not code a single routine since a week ago. Eight months working like a maniac on my startup. Alone. Crazy? Yeah.

Exhaustion? Probably. What to do? I was thinking on a small flight to Rome (I am in Madrid) I have friends there, but I do not fell very social. Ski? May be. What the hell! I hate feeling this way.

Max
My suggestion for you is that you to set one small task for yourself per day and force yourself to complete it until you feel compelled to work hard at it again. While it may be a real challenge for a time, at least then you will continue making forward progress. Nothing like progress makes you want to work on something. Good luck!
I thought you had lost (somehow) your capacity to solve some kind of problems. But now I see maybe you are talking about something very different: you aren't being able to do that because you don't have the will to do that.

Sorry to misunderstand you. If that's your problem, you don't need a doctor, my mistake.
Ditch it and work on something that interests you.
Survey: People skills valued over those for IT
Snocap melting away
Don't forget the part where your brand-new custom framework needs to properly serialize and deserialize each value based on its type. Because according to this person:
http://www.satine.org/archives/2007/12/13/amazon-simpledb/

...Amazon's magical indexing technology is to make all searches lexicographical. So you have to "zero-pad your integers, add positive offsets to negative integer sets, and convert dates into something like ISO 8601". Or something.

But at least you don't have to write one of those fiendishly difficult CREATE TABLE statements! Ah, "simplicity"!
"Having a well-defined home-life where you can have a clean house, and a simple spread of food available so that you have variety but don't have to think too hard when you go shopping. I've turned doing the dishes and ironing into relaxing, therapeutic exercises - works for me. There's nothing quite so simple and delighting as sweeping a wooden floor and having it clean at the end."

I agree. I find that if I am working (reading) all the time [I have a full time job and am moonlighting] its hard to keep the house clean and organized, but having a clean, well organized home really helps me have a clear head, and get something done. It also reduces the amount of stress you feel. I know this sounds very "new-agey" but it does help. Further, the very task of cleaning has a very cathartic effect on me. Start small, with the kitchen or the restroom, find a place for everything, and put everything in its place and see how you feel. This will also get you away from the computer for a while, and normally, after a few hours of cleaning I have neither the energy or the motivation to get any work done, so its a good day to take the evening off.

Hope this helps.
Meditation can do wonders. Just sit somewhere comfortable, give yourself 30 minutes, and don't think about anything. It can take practice -- maybe a lot of practice -- but the mental and physical recharge it gives is very refreshing. I find that the trick is scheduling it. Even if you can't turn off, just try for all 30 minutes. Eventually you'll get somewhere.

I liken it to getting into the Flow at doing nothing.
Pig Toy Gets Completely Squashed, Raises Like Terminator T1000
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001017.html
Why Apple Isn't Japanese
I was being sarcastic :P
Free Software Beer Network
Amazon SimpleDB and CouchDB compared
E.W. Dijkstra Archive: Answers to questions from students of Software Engineering
Three persuasion tips
Step 1 - Go outside and run a few miles.

Step 2 - If you're not too tired, call some friends and throw a party.

Step 3 - Pull a 24 hour computer fast.

Step 4 - Get a girlfriend.

If you manage to get past step 4, you're probably switched off. If you get to step 4 and you switch back on, be prepared to start over.
"temporary hack"
"To lead an orchestra, one must first turn his back to the crowd."
I do like the picture. I see a lot of traps and temptations that get in peoples' way.

But we should remember that in some sense we must all individually self-define what "success" is. I just don't buy the rat-race-up-the-mountain metaphor. Life is more about tradeoffs and operating near to your potential. And in pursuing idealistic goals.
Downmodding a statement of fact, a true sign of maturity ...
Where is the false logic?
Spooky, just made several (checked in, checked, released, reverted) fixes... this is a time of year of deep internal distractions. I know I just don't get as much exercises as other seasons, just a good walk can help.

Spooky that I was just at a chapter in Waitzkins' book (joshwaitzkin.com "The Art of Learning" - bit of a pretentious title but a fairly down to earth read about his struggles as a kid becoming a grand master) on keeping focus. Has some good ideas about re-focusing. Do programmers really have a monopoly on hyper-focus? I can't imagine now, let alone as a 10 yr old, being in a nine hour game that the (adult) opponent is dragging as a strategy to wear one down.
A co-founder is someone who starts a company with you and owns a portion of the company similar in size to your portion. The exact details of how you work it out, how you structure the company and how you involve lawyers are up to you.

Generally, I think you should avoid founding companies with people you think are going to rip you off. That's not to say that you shouldn't have proper paperwork.
Another excellent search is "don't know why this works"
Dijkstra: CS has "invited the quacks and charlatans in . . . Software Engineering gurus."
Who knows? Perhaps it's not optimal - but still better than human randomness.
I've got a friend who wants to start up a website. He's already got the domain, the idea, and needs admin and webdev help. But there's no business entity yet. He wants to include me, and have me share in the fruits of our labor, but sees no reason to put anything on paper. I'm guessing once an LLC is formed, only his name will be on it.

I trust my friend. But I've also seen money do strange things to people, and was wondering what the options are.

Thanks.
This happened to me last year. Then I bought Final Fantasy XII for ps2 and played it for 2 or 3 days straight. After that I felt a lot better and was able to do work again.
Interesting. But this does not necessarily say much about unlearning - as the distinction between living and non-living may be hard-wired into our brain. (Something along the lines of Steve Pinker's "the brain as a box of tools".)
I've actually been working on this idea for a bit. Pending holiday busy-ness, I'd like to have it out by the end of January.
"As for "undo", in general, the more we can lower the costs of making mistakes, the faster we can move."

One of the reasons for version control systems and automated-testing.
I find that having to study something takes away most of my natural desire to learn something. I have a psych final tonight, and instead I'm going through a CS textbook. I bet before my next CS exam I will suddenly be more interested in psychology.
"Facebook Business Solutions"
1. If this is a difficulty that is permeating the rest of your life. Go to a doctor or therapists of some sort and get help. There's no shame in it. I had a bought of depression once, went to therapy, and am much better now.

2. If it's just this one issue, it sounds like you might need a partner who doesn't mind setup. I find I'm very good at sitting and coding, but it is about ten times as hard for me to do setup. And often enough you need to do the setup to start coding anyway.

3. The other thing you might try is getting out of the house. If you're at home, you can be acclimated to a certain behavior. Getting out to a coffee shop or a friends house can change things up in a positive way. I go to a coffee shop whenever I've hit a wall at home.

4. Thinking in circles trying to self motivate can be very alluring. It is a natural impulse to analyze a problem. But if you run over the same ground, you stop learning anything new, and thinking about it starts to create anxiety. Letting go of that cycle can be done, sometime it requires conversation with others. Your posting here is a very good step.
I like (ultimate) frisbee.
@Zak, the secrecy is not by design, but the features are pretty loosely defined at this point, and will be driven by input from co-conspirators + customer response.
@big-j: To me, co-founder means exactly what you said: "Getting together with someone with complementary skills." No lawyers involved at this point, its just proof of concept mode.
You don't have to say @username. This site has nested comments.
Tried noprocrast but still spending too much time on news.yc? Try Zap Reader.
Billion-Dollar T Shirt
Why are people influenced so much by Dijkstra's thinking?
Wow, for a moment I thought it was for real :)

edit: good job, BTW.