skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. Write code
2. Read code

You should go with Python, the syntax is really easy and the code it produces is sexy.

To get you started right away, figure out what and how this does:

for i in range(5):
I can see how that may have come off as cynical. Let me clarify.

We are based in Waterloo, Ontario. We will be hiring an intern from the University of Waterloo. Waterloo has an all co-op engineering program (at the cost of having no time off for students, and a 5 year program.), so even if you're hiring a 2nd year intern the guy already has a year of experience at 3 different companies (not bullshit experience either, but serious engineering work at Google, Microsoft, nVidia etc.) So when I said interns were cheap I meant that we get a bargain for the level of experience the guy has.

When I say interns are easy to get rid of, I simply mean that the guy can seem downright brilliant in an interview, and have a solid resume, but turn out to be useless on the job. So it's nice to know that the worst cost you will incur is 4 months salary, and none of the paperwork associated with firing a full timer.

---------------
Tangent
---------------

Funny story. I was working at a software startup in Waterloo not too long ago and we were looking to hire. We got a bunch of resumes, and we were about to start interviews. One resume in particular was very impressive. The guy worked at Amazon, NVidia, and had just graduated from comp eng (very tough program to get into.) The guy who was going to do the interviewing thought there was something funny about this resume. He couldn't put his finger on it but something just wasn't right. Maybe it was that this guy with a very impressive resume was applying to a low level web development job. Anyway, so he decides to check this guy out. He googles the name, and he gets this: http://www.lankanewspapers.com/news%5C2006%5C8%5C8255_image_...
Suresh Sriskandarajah. The guy was on trial for smuggling weapons for the Tamil Tigers terrorist group in Sri Lanka. That's not all, this guy's court appearance date was set for 10 days after he sent in the resume. I'm not sure what the hell he was thinking he was going to do if we hired him. "ummmm, sorry guys I'm going to have to take sick leave for the next 5-10 years"
1. Write code
2. Read code

You should go with Python, the syntax is really easy and the code it produces is sexy.

To get you started right away, figure out what and how this does:

for i in range(5):
print i
They also charged money though. Unless everyone just stocked up on those 500 hours CDs.
The "because they are cheap" comment is definitely problematic. The best people are smart enough to know they have value. Of course, picking the best people is still a problem--no matter how much money is on offer, idiots will apply in larger number than great people (because great people are often being well-treated in their current position).

But the "if they turn out to be an idiot it's easy enough to get rid of them" is a big bonus for smart people. I've left contracts and jobs because the people around me weren't smart enough, or ambitious enough, to be doing the job they were hired to do, and yet they weren't cut loose. I don't want to screw around on a job where I know great things aren't going to come out the other end.

It may be hard to grasp everything everyone on the team is doing, and to know whether they're great at what they do (particularly if the project is large and has many individual pieces), but if you find yourself doing more work because of stupid stuff one of your team-mates is doing, it's a good sign that something isn't right. I don't know any great developer that enjoys that.
invite code?
How come you always apologize for your posts, when they are always so awesome? :)

I really enjoy reading what you have to say. Keep it up.
For those of you who have read "Four Hour Workweek" this is the company that Tim Fenriss pimps throughout the book.
If everything were sold like iPods
Ideablob: A Digg-like social network for biz ideas...
"Ideablob is a place for people to post their ideas for a small business and get feedback from other users. The other users can then vote for which idea they like the best, and each month the top voted business will be rewarded with $10,000 in seed money."
Smells like an urban legend. Sure enough, snopes has it: http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp

(Sorry in advance for those nasty pop-ups. Disable javascript if you have that luxury.)
"Ideablob is a place for people to post their ideas for a small business and get feedback from other users. The other users can then vote for which idea they like the best, and each month the top voted business will be rewarded with $10,000 in seed money."
Welcome to the Massachusetts Institute of Technicalities
I take your point and suggest you go back and explain 'the Greek miracle' as everything after Pythagoras is a distortion.
lame. i predict it will rain in seattle next year in summer.
Reddit Clone with Hunchentoot
Django may not be the way to go for a someone new to web development, for the simple reason that there is exactly ONE place to get any documentation, and that source is less than excellent.
If for some reason you dislike ruby on rails (my first choice), I would say learn PHP. All you are trying to do is develop a web app, take the easiest path.

Finally,when your app gets complex and you need to hire programmers, you will thank me for this advice
I'm a student who will soon (spring/summer) be looking for an internship with a start-up, so I was reading this from the other point of view trying to figure out how start-ups recruit so I would know where to look. As it turns out, I am in Waterloo as well.

I've been wondering for a while how much of a disadvantage I am in terms of getting an internship like this because I am not in the co-op program (besides advice and employment courses), as an employer do you give this much thought? (sorry to go off topic; I have talked to students about this but I figured I should jump at the chance to ask an actual employer.)

By the way, any chance you will be at BarCamp?
Have you ever seem most managers give a presentation?

Enough said I think. :-)
Turning $1,000 Into $277 Trillion
It sounds like you are unattached and without kids, so the short answer is SF.

San Francisco is expensive. The Mission District is best IMO: good nightlife, good transport, but the noise, fog, and urine-in-the-street levels are lower than the Tenderloin. Expect to pay 1600+ for a 1 bedroom.

I have friends who live in East Oakland, and love it. It's much cheaper and very accessible if you land near a BART station.
I suggest paying a few people for small tasks. You will find out that some people become really committed to the company, some people are really excited at first but turn out to be very flaky.

Have a long term hiring plan for finding excellent employees. In the interim, bring on interns/friends/outsource to India. Of course, this assumes you have some money to pay them.

Best of luck.
"If the idea is "lets make a better search engine that uses a unique ranking system based on links to estimate the popularity of any given page" then I'd say the idea is worth something."

Not without a working implementation, no.

"The probable difference between ConnectU and Facebook? Facebook spammed all of Harvard to get its initial traction, ConnectU didn't."

Right. Execution.
Good call, we still have to update the main site with some changes. You've nailed us though, because we did the marketing change on Sunday, and the online version hasn't caught up with localhost.
On the use of language, try reading up on E-prime. When you change a sentence from "This food is tasty" to "This food tastes good to me" or "That is a tree" to "That looks like what I understand to be a tree", a lot of these issues around language become clearer.

Who is the master who makes the grass green?
Yes, give me 1 hour to roll out some changes, you can either have it here or in your inbox. I'll post some here.
You're doing both deltapoint and Python a bit of a disservice by choosing this example as a starting point. I imagine if I had never seen python I would expect something like

12345

It's quite arbitrary that what you see is different, and while there is some rationale to it, it's not very enlightening. Definitely not the kind of thing I'd have a newcomer focus on.
Feedback on my new project, ShelfMade.net
The concept is designed for people that check Reddit and YC News 10 times a day.

Find a worthwhile article that is too long to read right now? Just shelv it and get back to work.
Well,I wouldn't want a manager giving a presentation either. I'd want a sales guy.
I like this idea:

"This could take the form of reserving a modest number of places in the freshman class -- say 5 percent to 10 percent -- for applicants who, having met a high academic threshold, would be selected at random. While the admissions office would know the identities of the students admitted by lottery, no one else -- not faculty, not employers and not the students themselves -- would."

I agree with the author that it would be a good way to assess if the more involved admissions process selected higher quality students.
"We're getting ready to hire our first employee. We've decided to go with an intern, because they are cheap, and if they turn out to be an idiot it's easy enough to get rid of them."

i bet that person feels very loved right now.
I didn't say all, I said most.

From my own observation, programmers can and do have a very difficult time both understanding what people are willing to pay for, and getting them to pay for it.

Some hackers are great salesmen, and a few business folk are decent programmers, but if you're going to use the painting analogy the way the GP did, you can't discount the act of selling as something that'll just happen.
IN OTHER NEWS: Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were seen taking hits from a large bong outside the headquarters of the Redmond giant on Monday.

Ballmer was quoted as saying,"This wacky tobaccky is sooo good. Let's buy Dunkin Donuts for $20 billion! Mmmmm, donuts..." He then proceeded to do a Monkeyboy Dance, to the giggling delight of a baked Bill Gates. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc4MzqBFxZE
I'm not quite sure I get it. What am I supposed to do with all of my magazines? Give them to friends? Sell them?

It would be cool if you could get a contract with Starbucks/Borders to put the most popular magazines in the store each month. That way it would give users an incentive to create. Granted, getting distribution like that would be quite difficult.
> Most of Myspace's user base (and thus value) was added since the acquisition.

Nah, the hot young promiscuous girls were there from early on.
It's a good question, and one that comes to mind every now and then. I guess it depends on the attitude of the learner- to be more precise, on their ambition, curiosity, and patience.

If someone just wants to see results ASAP, if they see programming as some annoyance to get out of the way in order to get stuff done, give them Python (as a bonus, it may change their minds and get them in love with programming). For those with more curiosity, who want to get a deep understanding of things in general, or for those with a deeper interest in programming in particular, I would try Scheme first.

This is not to say that Python and Scheme are opposite extremes in terms of practicality and ability to enlighten. Both languages are pretty good at both IMO. You can't go very wrong with either.
Tufte inspired LaTeX classes for producing handouts and papers
I disagree. The usage was very different.

Oh, and I upvoted you by accident. Damn.
I'm not trying to be rude but they're looking for someone who is ready to do the task. If you wanted a chance to grow (as in someone to mentor you), you should definitely go to another place.
FUD isn't supposed to be specific.
"I didn't say all, I said most."

if you don't provide a counter example - it's almost the same as saying all

if you think most programmers are pizza box hermits, i think you need to spend some time with more of them. the stereotype has some basis in some parts of the country, but i think it's largely overblown

I'm not discounting the act of selling... it's just from my personal experience most business people aren't great at presenting or selling either - it's only a few (saying something is very different from doing - this relates to my view on ideas too), hence the need for proof (or your cash)
Ballmer sells Windows 1.0... used car salesman style!
Easy CSS Layouts with YUI CSS Grid Builder
Can bytecodes perform well?
It sounds more like you create a magazine with just the content you want from the blogs that you like. Shelfmade then prints and mails you that magazine and you can read it offline. Perhaps for a long overseas flight or something like that. Could be cool if it catches on.
Having done both, ideas are much easier. (I have 2 issued and 10 pending, 7 of which are a company's crown jewels.)
Thanks for the comment.

Users get paid when people shelv their articles and they spread ideas - same incentives as blogging.

Of course we would love to be in retail eventually, and it may be possible. I think the cooler aspect is that you can subscribe to the magazine that PG builds (eventually) or you can build a magazine for your employees to read.

Instead of Chris Anderson choosing what articles are important this month, you can subscribe to Noah Kagan's or a friend from college's magazine.
This is a good question. One way to answer this is to think of what I would want from the startup experience:

1) A chance to work with great people. This is by far the most important thing. And since a startup typically has only a few people, the chances of one of them being 'not great' is pretty small, as there is no room to hide.

2) The idea has to be in an area that appeals to me (opportunity cost of working on something that isn't interesting should be considered).

3) The work environment - this goes back to 1) again. More clearly, working with smart people who you actually like hanging out with would be ideal.

Perks and stuff doesn't really matter. The salary should be competitive, but I wouldn't really care 10-20% either way if the above conditions were satisfied. But at such an early hire level, a good chunk of equity would be a must (perhaps not for an intern, but something to think of if/when you decide to bring them on full time).
And for slides there's the Beamer class: http://latex-beamer.sourceforge.net/

(If MS Office/OpenOffice is "office 1.0" and GDocs/Buzzword/Sliderocket is "office 2.0", then what is LaTeX?)
Sounds more like CYA than FUD. They don't want anyone suing them if they ran "brickit.app" thinking it was an unlocker.
I can hardly work on code that's more than 80 characters across. Am I the only one?
Yeah, but we're not talking about people here. We're talking about one guy, who possibly did a stupid thing by buying it. If someone mistook glass shards for diamonds and bought them for $10k, it doesn't mean the glass shards are worth $10k.
Deceptive AdSense Ads Worse Than Click Fraud
What happens when you've done it wrong, and can't fix it? What about before you have anything to do, and need to come up with something? What about when selecting between severally (seemingly) equally-important things to "do right"?

And all this is just for yourself. What's the "right" way to motivate someone else to work? To motivate yourself? To fire someone? (And this is avoiding the oft-answered-here ones such as "to find the right kind of employee.")
I'm sure they are. They also happen to be recruiting people from my university, and they are in a situation I will be on the other side of in a few months time. The fact that I am in Waterloo is relevant not because I want this specific internship (heck, I don't even know what it is), but because I am interested in the area's job market. Who better to ask than a local employer?
To be honest the idea itself doesn't seem especially sexy or exciting to me, although if it's well executed I could see myself using it. It seems novel enough to be worth a try.

That being said, I'm not sure how easy it will be to translate blog posts into print in a way that's visually appealing. A lot of bloggers are big into using whitespace, which would look pretty weird in a print medium. And often there is meaning conveyed by the whitespace itself, so it's not necessarily easy to reformat posts into nice paragraphs.
Erik Sink on the Business of Software (Free Book in PDF)
Are you at a disadvantage by not being in co-op? Yes, definitely. Get in co-op. Seriously, it's really hard to overstate how valuable this is.

However, a lot of companies that post jobs at UW also post them online. RIM for example hires hundreds of students from UW every term and their entire application process is online so you're probably not at a disadvantage there. Microsoft has their recruiting sessions here every few days it seems, so just attend one of those and hand out your resume. Now that Google has a branch in town just attend one of their sessions too.

If you're specifically looking to work for a startup, your best bet is to look up companies in the Accelerator Center (north campus, in the Research and Technology park.) There are about 15 startups there now. Terrapath and SuitedMedia are on a hiring binge, so just walk in there and talk to the president, you'll probably have a job on the spot. Don't be afraid, the guys there are all only a few years older than you, so don't feel intimidated at the prospect of just coming in and talking to the boss :)
Moving on
inspiring
MicroISV Gets 20,000 Downloads a Day From Apple Downloads Feature (switched from Win to Mac dev)
"... Are there books you suggest i read, or tutorials to start with? ..."

I'd suggest trying to change your "mindset" as well, building and reading supporting information at the same time. One such way is to read "SEIA" (Software Engineering for Internet Applications, Andersson, Greenspun & Grumet) which is online or in print and follow the book through ~ http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/

The book/course is easy to read and most important devoid of advocacy. The good thing is you can start now at no real cost. But it will take time and effort though.
Ask News.YC: Should You Implement Your Business Model at Launch? Joe Kraus vs Paul Graham
Any time two people who know a ton about startups seem to differ there's something interesting to think about.

Joe Kraus> Put your business model into beta when you put your product into beta.

Paul Graham> The reason we tell founders not to worry about the business model initially is that making something people want is so much harder.

I've run into this myself. With my new project advertising is a hassle to manage, so much so that I've considered not having ads at all at first. I'm concerned that not having ads initially and then adding them later would result in users feeling as though I used bait and switch to trick them.

It seems to me that if your business model impacts the product directly it may be necessary to implement it at launch. I think that's what I have to do at least.
I Was a Cybercrook for the FBI
The paucity of students from poor and working-class backgrounds at the nation's selective colleges should be a national scandal.

If you solve this problem, one generation later you have re-created it, as the children of previously poor families have gained the wealth associated with Harvard diplomas. The truth is--the problem such as it is, genuinely existed through almost all of history up until the middle of the 20th century. The problem was solved, and It's all but gone now.

The poor are largely poor because of themselves and not circumstances. Where exceptions to this exist, they will be quickly eradicated by individuals who partake the widely available financial aid for college.
The long tail for magazines? Sounds cool but I'm worried about a contradiction... Yes the market for tree based magazines is still HUGELY HUGE and you could make a lot of money creating lots of special interest mags the big guys ignore. But... If your audience is web-savy enough to discover your service, they probably get most of their news from the web and they don't care about magazines.

Your ideal customer would be web-savy but their end subscribers would not be. I'm too absorbed in the www to imagine who that may be, but I'm sure they're out there. On news.yc though, you'll probably get a bunch of people saying "why not just read a blog?"

Godspeed.
BE CAREFUL.

Speaking from personal experience, hiring a bunch of coders in India can either be a fantastic investment and cheap way of getting a prototype done...

...or a minefield of poor communication, miscommunication, a LACK of communication, total misinterpretation of spec, and dog-ugly code.... don't even ask about database structure (or lack thereof).

The startup I've been working for over the past 12 months had one such development team do a prototype, and the next 3 months was a nightmare of bug fixes and code rewrites.

So if there's one thing I can emphasise if you're thinking of engaging an offshore development team.... get references. LOTS of references, and make sure they check out!
An idea for where you might want to take this would be to turn it into a service for other sites to use. A social networking site webmaster would use your service to offer their users the ability to drag n drop functionality on their page. You would make it easy for the webmaster to create "widgets" that can be added/removed. Basically iGoogle for any site that wants it but doesn't want to get involved in the hairy mess of making a solid and reliable drag n drop interface.
Linux File Structure
Have them do the job during the interview. What better way could there be to find out if they are competent to do the work? Have a look at Nick Corcodilos's Reinventing the Interview: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452278015?ie=UTF8&tag=...
Being the constantly proofreading sort, I'm not sure why you're capitalizing random words and phrases, like "Print" and "On Demand".

Also, I really didn't want to fill in my name, email, and URL, but I clicked the "Yes!" box to see what would happen. Now I have an overlay window occupying the center of my screen, with no way to get rid of it save by entering the aforementioned info. That's annoying.

Now that that's out of the way, one question: Will people actually pay for this? I mean, pretty much the only time I read a print magazine is if I'm really bored at the airport. Otherwise, the Web is all I need.
NM05XEHf

pCD0UwHG

VD1bPrmR

First come first serve, or e-mail me for an account.
"Most of Myspace's user base (and thus value) was added since the acquisition."

How many of those new users were because of News Corp's acquisition? If majority of those users would be added anyway (if it was just a matter of time), and an astute investor could predict that, its valuation of $580m or even more would be justified.

Today most financial publications believe Murdoch got Myspace for a bargain.
Thanks for sharing your experience. What do you think about outsourcing other things than software development? For example, people that are too busy to read all those long articles in social news sites could outsource such time consuming tasks to India. ;>
I think you're misinterpreting Joe Kraus. I've seen him do his "Startup Addict" presentation twice now, once at Startup School and once at a YC dinner, and in neither instance did I come away with the impression that he meant you have to start making money immediately.

The meaning I took from this "business model in beta" statement was, "you have to be willing to admit you don't understand how you're going to make money; be willing to evolve the business model based on what you learn after launch". Which seems entirely consonant with what pg has said.