skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The biggest problem with age is, its not static.

If in your 20's you feel, some one over 30's is a plague. You have a big reason to be worried, because you will be in your 30's in less than 10 years. That's too less time for comfort.
Probability and Risk in the Real World
A question that's been on my mind. Since this deck discusses B2C startups, how to do you reach out to a consumer on a telephone to determine if they would be a good customer? How do you figure out what that consumer wants?

I see all the advice to do all of this stuff before writing code, but I see others that suggest "failing fast" by building something and seeing who ultimately uses it and what they use it for.

Let's say I wanted to make a picture hosting site (I don't), I would find my unique selling proposition and build a site around that, get the URL out in front of people that probably want to host pictures, then see how many of them sign up and how many ultimately use the USP feature that I built.

In my case it's not as broad or generic a concept, so I can't throw a URL out there and just see how many people sign up for the site. I mean I can but I can't expect that to actually work, for anybody to actually show up.

I know there are online communities out there I need to reach, blogs that focus on the target audience I am reaching for, and quite possibly thought leaders.

What am I missing when it comes to building and marketing a B2C product?
I disagree, I found it very muddled. For example, how are split(' ') and join(' ') supposed to be adjoint functors when they're not even functors?
> PDFs are viewable in the browser and resizeable. They are operating system agnostic. Most importantly, they preserve the formatting that the original author intended.

So are most webpages.

> Just that most paper authors will not be savvy enough to do it right. [...]

I believe this can be done gracefully in a manner where the authors just supply a source file and the software chain will generate the requisite output formats (much like pdflatex or Pandoc do the job today). Scientists should NOT have to muck around with HTML/CSS/JS/etc else the solution would be DOA.
How do you find out about this sort of thing before it happens? I regularly read LtU and did not see this there... I happened to be in Chicago last weekend and would have gone.
It was supposed to be Google except with privacy.
> " Gentoo also provides some fantastic tools for maintaining your system. ‘eselect’, for example, makes it easy to symlink your kernel,"

This whole post could have been sarcasm. I know it isn't, but, this is exactly what I never ever want from the computer I use for daily tasks. I just want it to work.
I don't see why number 2 can't be done on any other distro. Nothing is stopping you from compiling your own kernel on any of them. Of coarse its rare that people would bother.

3 is also a feature of Arch. The problem is now you have to spend time setting that stuff up. More problematic is you have to actually know you need to set something up. Did you remember/bother to tweak, your ssd settings in fstab? Setup OpenAL for 3d sound? Your HDD IO schedular? Your TCP buffer settings? Your font renderers antialiasing? All that crap sould be taken care of (although admitidly distros don't seem to do things like setup SSD schedulers to deadline/nop.

1 seems a be redonculious. There is very little reason to really worry about having a few extra packages lying around as long as there not running stuff in the background. I think it's more for people with a case of OCD about their file system.
One more important thing to understand about Jobs "miracle" is that he was allowed to do what he was obsessed with. No idiotic "manager" or board member intervene with ideas of "cutting costs" on packaging or materials or any other fast-food technologies to reduce the product to the mix of cheapest and crapest ingredients imaginable. No idiots insisted that it is much more "effective" to just add a "theme" to and old code, to make it look like touch-capable (hi Symbian, WinCE) etc. No one said that re-implementing from scratch, because everything else is crap is costly and time-consuming, and so on.

There are lots of people with good taste, sense of style and quality (read Pirsig's book) and enough self-discipline to follow do what one is preaching, but it is an extreme rare situation when such people have enough influence to make things their own way.

I guess a half of YC business is about trying to spot an employ such obsessed individuals, no matter what exactly they want to accomplish. Early funding of even one of such guys worth waiting and funding hundreds of mediocre, especially if one has connections to channel or sell them off.)

Igor Sysoev was obsessed with efficiency (in that time c10k problem was actual), so src/core and src/os/unix should be taught in colleges (btw, the module system is already an over-engineered mess).

There are many other examples, but the big idea is simple - spot the right people, all that numerous micro-optimizations, while valuable, are superficial.
It could be more of a motivator instead of educational or entertaining. Just seeing others getting things done sort of rubs off on you.
The article was written in 2007, when Intel's latest CPU was the Core 2 Duo. Lots of people still had P4's back then.
I wonder how you consider visiting such a place in such a way that fosters commercial gain for the establishment morally defensible? Particularly when you can see enough across the Chinese portion of the border (particularly in the east, near the town of Chiangbaishan) to understand the situation. Have you no shame?
I find it fascinating that, with YC and HN, PG has essentially created a "business school for hackers" that is free, open to anyone, and makes it faster and easier for any hacker to gain a solid understanding of business and marketing principles.

And yet on the flip side, I see no one in the MBA/business world who is effectively doing the opposite i.e. creating a forum and/or institution in the mold of YC/HN for "business guys" to develop a fundamental understanding of (and respect for) technical leadership and software engineering concepts. I wonder why... Is it because it's more difficult, or more because business people just don't care and never will?

People often say that YC changed the VC industry, but in a way I think the YC and HN models together are slowly but surely disrupting the "business education industry" as well.

Thoughts?
I think it's like owning a classic car that you need to pamper all the time. It's a tool much like your computer but some people love tinkering.
Some volcanoes 'scream' at ever-higher pitches until they erupt
Whoa. Once the code is written and so long as the rest of the infrastructure is in place, it can be done wholesale. Cheaply. In perpetuity. To anyone.

To do so sans technology requires an undue amount of resource. Ie the energy required to surveil 1x1 personally vs algorithmically is substantial and one is much more feasible than the other (especially if you don't read the TOS - and who does?)

All that said, though, I think we are mostly on the same page: you have to accept responsibility for your actions in public. I think where we differ though is that the majority of people don't have a clue wtf is actually going on.

PS the argument doesn't hate you. It's willing to take any and all input, process it, and maybe come out changed. It loves, respects, and thrives on you.
Linguist Finds a Language in Its Infancy
split(' ') and join(' ') aren't quite inverses of each other, but they are adjoint.

Do you mean you think they are adjoint functors? How are they functors, between which categories?
I can but I don't need to. The receivers can't decrypt them.
We stand for it only because the people being tracked are likely to be criminals. We understand that if we do not engage in criminal activity we will very likely not be followed. If my local store started tracking me for no good reason I would go elsewhere.
Sure, maybe, but that's tangential from my point. My point was if you're making something that can't be tinkered with it's probably not for hackers.

The entire subculture stems from people who tinkered with things, specifically guys making model trains do cool things, like adjust based on what someone sends in from a telephone. I would expect that the minimum that everyone calling themselves a hacker has is an urge to tinker.
>Likewise, from the very same two paragraphs you reference you would find that the Bush-definition of enemy combatant describes an "unlawful combatant" who has no right to POW status under Geneva or the LOAC.

no. Under Geneva, "unlawful combatants", like everybody else, are to be treated like protected POW until transferred to criminal or military justice system (lawful combatants are protected from such transfer). The "enemy combatant" status in the US is "unlawful combatant to whom both are intentionally and systematically denied - transfer to criminal or military justice system as well as POW status". That isn't "unlawful combatant" of Geneva, it is a violation of Geneva.

>they "ordered the Bush administration to either charge Padilla or release him.".

exactly.

> In fact the term 'enemy combatant' was dropped in 2009 coincident to a certain regime change in the U.S.

words change. People are still being held in Gitmo in violation of Geneva.
Automated methods of surveillance also allows for a level of surveillance that might not be possible even with a very large staff. As technologies enable and lower the barrier, more and more businesses and governments are likely to spy/check on people without reason. So it simply isn't true that without technology to aid the would be spies, that surveillance would remain the same or even at a similar level simply due to their diligence.
NASA 3D prints engine injector; saves manufacturing time; cuts costs by 70%
I like git-annex better. Because git-annex doesn't automatic keep copies of the files in all the directories you've shared. When you need a file that's not in your local directory you can just pull it from a different place, git-annex keeps track where the file is stored.
Google "Miskatonic" so you can be in on the joke.
There is a difference between security personnel (who may be responsible for observing hundreds or thousands of people per shift) and wholesale aggregation, analyzing, and collection of data.
Piracy: Not Even God Himself Can Stop It
Idea: how about super-heated air in a balloon lined with aerogels to act as an insulator.

Air at 1000f is a third as dense as air at 200f.
I used gentoo for many years. I have come to view this as something of an abusive relationship. Now I'm a happy arch user, and no longer think of interactions with the package manager with a sense of dread!

Also, the article had some fantastic (unintentional?) references to http://funroll-loops.info/
The State of US Health, 1990-2010
Because of the stuff mentioned later, that function application, for loops, and all kinds of other things are fully "assigment" as well, Python is just flinging around all kinds of names all over the place (it is essentially what a Python program is in many ways) and it is inevitable that there is no one-to-one mapping, and that duplications will happen all the time. After all,

x = 1
y = [x, 2]
for z in y:

"naturally" creates a duplicate binding on the value of x, without anything as crass as "x = y = []". As is always the case of a three-line example in a little post, when found in the wild this can be a much more hidden thing in the middle of a 50-line function. (Which of course nobody ever writes because all 50-line functions are too long, and therefore, no 50-line functions actually exist. But if they did, this sort of thing would happen in them all the time.)
I would encourage you to consider having a abridged version, in addition to the unedited version. Or at the least, a blog post where the reader can 'scrub' the video to a part of interest (e.g. proverbial 11pm design change/decision). Some of the best (and popular) blog posts out there detail the process of creation, skimming over some of the more tedious parts, to enhance the theme of the process of creating.

To echo the others, if you could annotate your thought process - it would be helpful. I would put an analog clock up (less flashy than digital) to subtly catalog the time of day in the video frames.

If you capture the raw output, you can always speed it up ala Notch building a game.

To go to the next level, consider making a visualization of how you built the app - after you've done it.

[1] http://www.joystiq.com/2011/12/18/notch-live-streams-making-...
I donated and I don't often donate (though I really should). It's not just how awesome the software is that compels me but his dedication to his work and his frugal lifestyle that leaves me wanting to support this guy with all his projects.
Does Fantasy Offer Escapism or Escape?
Thanks; I just wasted 1/2 hour reading through that site and groaning.
Other Electricities' giveaway = "Black Dolphin" by Dim Past
The forced .md and underscores was mostly for speed of development on the first version of Daux. I agree it is a bit arbitrary and I plan on making the requirements a bit less strict in the future.
try checking a 100 million digit prime number in 100ms http://www.mersenne.org/legal/#awards
I had an odd way to follow this advice. I am learning to code and in 4 months I went from no knowledge at all to learning basic CSS/Html to basic C# to basic MVC to be able to launch and start selling a useful enough SaaS to acquire a few paying customers.
I am just not a good enough developer to automate everything, I can't even code properly without Visual Studio helping me.

I am not dangerous, but I now know enough to be useful. I am trying to make my customers happy. The first feature I added after launch was something my first paying customer asked.

My product helps senior citizens to control their medications (what, when and how many pills they must take, which days, and alert when they need to buy more pills). I will start to put handouts on drugstores. Better than hoping elderly internet users know their way through google ads.

I spent 3 hours watching the first prospect to ever use my product taking a look at it for the first time (that would be my father). I left with literally 50 notes of what I should do immediately and some more thoughts of future features.

I am not a hacker, but I guess this helped me thinking more about what people want, because there was not much I could do from my own ideas and knowledge.
>>Taking your best coder and then spending their time on not-coding is wasteful of their talents.

Or the way I look at it, such a guy in a leader ship position can mentor young passionate folks to be just like him.

>>Furthermore, insofar as you create competition to hold that position

Having competent guys compete for a position is far better than promoting a total idiot to lead such guys.

>>you're creating a destructive work environment.

How is appointing a competent guy creating a destructive work environment, and appointing an incompetent guy not creating a demotivating environment.

Most demotivating part of my day is when I spend time with my higher ups, explaining them some very basics things like SQL or regular expressions or about network call latency which most of the times they have no clue of. Many times its so bad, you really have to talk to them like you talk to your 9 year old nephew and even after hours of explaining things are so bad they can't really get simple things like the difference between a DOM parser and a SAX parser.

I am not saying the guy must code like a champion 24x7. But he should have atleast been some one who has built a thing or two under tough demanding deadlines. Some one who has leaned stuff doing it by experience and not just some guy whose only known accomplishment is being at the right place at the right time, riding an economic wave or being some god father manager's yes man.

>>Software development is a cooperative activity that can't be efficiently partitioned.

Exactly that is why we need one of us to lead us.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadro_Tracker
Agree, no debate about when you might have managed agile teams... could be you're Ken Schwaber (yeah, had to look up his name), but it then begs the 2nd question I raised... why would you want to do a startup? If you have 12+ years of experience with what is now a very hot process why, why?, WHY? would you want to work at a startup?

A VP role doesn't sound like a C role. It doesn't sound like a really big equity play. You're not going to be a founder w/ a big payout (probably). So why do it?

I'm repeating myself. It really doesn't matter at all... someone will apply or they will not and the company will hire the right person or they will not... you and I will go along with our lives just fine.
I don't see the benefit of this, it basically seems to strip out semicolons, dollar symbols and a different function syntax.. I suspect it's very limited (for example I see no object support, let alone traits, generators, etc) and could further complicate deployment. Can you summarise the benefits and strategic goals of the project?
>If my local store started tracking me for no good reason

You can know that the store uses secret shoppers in general but unless the secret shoppers are terrible at their jobs, you wouldn't know whether or not you're being tracked.

Also, doing traffic analysis and strategically placing displays in retail stores has been happening since long before cell phones. Just put someone behind one-way glass, on the mezzanie level of a mall, or even right on the floor with a clipboard.
I agree I should have used a template engine. I wrote most of this with the idea that it would be a proof of concept but ended up turning into something I felt others would still benefit from. It's still simple enough to get around the code without a template engine, but I would love to refactor one in.
My experience is that many product managers (who often are originally software engineers / in technical roles) end up in MBA programs
Oh, one more thing:

I sign every email I send from my computer, thanks to my client's use of smartcards for employee badges. Windows and Outlook both make this really easy to do. Mac OS X, BSD Unix, and Linux? Not a great user experience there. And smartphones? I don't know if accessing a smartcard is even possible. I wouldn't mind putting certificates on my phone as long as accessing them would still require a PIN, but my client's enrollment process doesn't encompass smartphones yet, plus I sincerely doubt that they are as difficult to compromise as my smartcard.
At the very least, quibbling like this is arguing about definitions, which is a waste of time if the word in question isn't technical.
Most CS departments are small, because the 101 courses usually have enormous dropout rates. People come in thinking: I'll write apps. I'll write computer games. I'll be like the cool hackers in the movies. I'll be a billionaire.

About halfway through their first cryptic gcc error message, these students discover that their burning passion is really for Arts or Business or whathaveyou.
I came in to mention the tufte latex class. It is unfortunate that you posted the link with no context. If you are going to post a link with no context I would think that one of the two samples would have been a better choice:

sample handout: http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/tufte-latex/sam...

sample book: http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/tufte-latex/sam...

For those looking for some context:

"The Tufte-LATEX document classes define a style similar to the style Edward Tufte uses in his books and handouts. Tufte’s style is known for its extensive use of sidenotes, tight integration of graphics with text, and well-set typography. This document aims to be at once a demonstration of the features of the Tufte-LATEX document classes and a style guide to their use."
Once in a while, there's a scandal about the Whitehouse pulling up IRS records of opponents (or so it is claimed).

Just wait till the day some jerk in the WH decides to pull up ALL communications of opponents: every phone call, every text, every email. He'd be able to blackmail the Congress into doing anything he wanted.
A Cornell Note about Cornell Notes
I'm guessing you don't work in cryptography research, and so posting on deep security issues seems pretty silly to me. The US government has endorsed demonstrably weak random number generating algorithms, and it is security professionals jobs to be very conservative.

As was discussed in Bruce Schneier's article about Dual_EC_DRBG:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_strange_st...

(Edit: This article was just discussed on HN only two weeks ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5997483)
Speaking from personal experience, it's easier to pick up the traits of customer development/leadership/design with an engineering background. On the contrary, I've seen some of the smartest non engineer MBAs give up on programming. Not sure why.
This is completely true, and I started a Github issue to create an optional build script to generate a static set of files that could be deployed to S3, Github Pages or something similar. https://github.com/justinwalsh/daux.io/issues/6
Advice from the frontline of “Startup-ing”
I am an American. I knew they had ridiculous laws like this in the UK. I recall hearing about some lady who said something racist on a subway and got arrested. Pretty ridiculous in my opinion.

>The fact that the NSA scandal has become...well such a scandal is that those principals existed to be violated in the first place.

It still would have been pretty big news. The director of national intelligence lied to congress. People likely would have just brushed that under the table (like they are doing now) though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_R._Clapper#False_testimo...
Perhaps it isn't the government you should be concerned about encrypting your email from.
It's not so much a matter of enmity (or lack thereof) as it is a matter of capability (or lack thereof). China and Russia are capable of causing serious harm to U.S. citizens and interests. Ecuador, not so much.

Of course, this view does not account for black swans, but I think the possibility of an entirely unprecedented method for a militarily and economically inferior nation to meaningfully harm U.S. citizens and/or interests being developed and put to use (not even accounting for alliances or motives) is sufficiently low that the risk is not worth surveilling the world to mitigate.
Thanks! We will be pushing a fix for the scrollbar issue.
I have heard some people having issues with horizontal scrolling, I am still trying to get to the bottom of this.
Totally agree.

It's been discussed on HN before, but here's another concrete example of this sort of thinking: killing the no-reply address. IMHO, there is no reason your startup should use no-reply for any emails, ever. Yes, it's a hassle to sort through all the out of office replies, but it's worth it.

Even if you tell people not to, they will reply to your newsletter or order confirmation or forgotten password message. And -- better yet -- they're often complaints! I like reading complaints. It's easy to find people to tell you you're doing great; I want to hear more about how we can improve. At my startup we make a point to reply to just about every message someone sends us (customer or not), but that's especially true of complaints. More than once I've gotten back replies like, "Wow I didn't expect anyone to read [my rant about how the site doesn't work on an Android 1.6 tablet]. Thanks for getting back to me!"
"Git-annex now auto-syncing photos from my android phone
to a Tor hidden SSH service I control (via
@guardianproject's Orbot) #prismbreak"

Interesting. I love to see how that is all set up. I'm wondering if that can be done with a Drobo. If not, what is required to get a mini-server set up that connects to Drobo over iscsi.