skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's ironic here is all the push-back from people about why you seemingly don't need to think about anything but code. There's a bunch of hacker and code-specific reasons not to write code first he doesn't even mention.

- To provide a usable product for your customer you need to ask them what they want. I can't tell you how often I see tools that are practically unusable for the target audience because the devs were just writing with devs in mind and couldn't be bothered to take a couple days to do interviews. (I'm looking at you, every-open-source-tool-that-gets-shown-off-on-HN)

- Writing code first also means you probably didn't have a plan for the entire design flushed out, which means hacks on top of hacks, which is equivalent to a giant Jenga stack with half the pieces missing.

- How will this code be used in 10 years (if at all)? In 20? Is it going to be made obsolete, or will your users and their needs change? (think multimedia, transportation, competing market forces, legislation, etc)
I thought you pay in advance when you take the bus too. At least that was the case in the few countries I visited.
Thanks, that's fantastic.

It's funny, I found it to be very emotionally evocative. I loved my IIci so, back in the day. The tinkering with the background images, recording everyone on the dorm hall making funny noises, replacing the system sounds, making the shutdown sound be HAL, etc.

It definitely helped that campus was pretty much all-Mac, so we all could tweak the same silly noises, and all try to find the joke that sounded silliest when told by the Talking Moose.

I don't have the same connection to my Mac these days. I wonder if it's just me, if the college freshmen have the same experience in 2013, or if it's somehow just an artifact of that particular era in computing.
Except that's not what they did. They looked at what's probably the most meaningful ratio, and they found that it's not merely lower but around 5x lower.

(This sort of comment is a good illustration of a problem with forums, incidentally. Once a forum has users who reply by mischaracterizing what you say, every comment is twice as much work. First you say what you want to, and then you have to make another comment saying in effect "no, what I said was...")
I think you missed the point a little bit.

The point isn't to get them to confirm what you want to build is the right thing, it's to learn more about their problems to find out what you should build.
Most of the time your lambda looks like

[](arg1, arg2){ short line of code};

which isn't that verbose at all.
It would be. In fact, if you suffered from seasonal depression you would probably love the first winter in SF! However after a few years you'd adjust and that would be your new low and you'd be back to square 1.
I really don't understand all of the negative feedback to this post (maybe I didn't see the old title, as it has evidently changed).

It seems like this is straightforward honest advice when you're trying to solve somebody else's problem(s). Some other folks have mentioned other products as examples of build first, but those all seem to have been people solving their own problem/desires.

If you're trying to create a business that attempts to solve other people's problems, this approach would be excellent. The example that the author used (Movie theater) illustrates the point of view perfectly. I suspect none of us have ever had the problem of watching a movie and being distracted by the fact that we didn't purchase enough snacks. That is not a problem a 'user' has ever thought of, but I would guess theater owners think about it a lot.
This whole "everything has to be a business" mentality can get pretty toxic. It's perhaps the root cause for all sorts of things like proprietary software (not inherently evil, but by definition cannot be trusted), software patents, DRM and whatnot.

A hacker who has an idea will do it regardless of whether it'll make them money or not.
The problem is that other companies are trying to replicate a model.

Mojangs model wasn't really a model, they needed money to continue the development of Minecraft. People really liked the idea of a voxel creative adventure game at the time and spread the word. Now the market is saturated with them, yet Minecraft is still on top.

Expecting the model to play out the same again is stupid, because the original conditions that caused Minecraft to be successful have changed.

At the time, Notch just wanted a game that played the way Minecraft did; he was focused on building something cool that played into his nostalgia.
Wow, the debugger tools looke very nice. Will need to check them out.
Minecraft is an example of a game at the right place, at the right time.

A great number of products and business ideas spring from noticing that something seemingly necessary doesn't exist, which, said another way, is recognizing that there is a right time out there waiting for the right thing to come along.

I see the battle here as a conservative/liberal one. Not politically, necessarily, but of personal effort. Do you research and line up customers and let people wait for the product to arrive, and in this way creating a right place for a product to occur in (hopefully) the right time? This i see as conservative with ones own efforts while beign liberal with other peoples' time and attention. Alternatively, being liberal with one's own efforts in creating a product that can be presented in a turnkey fashion, effectively treating the customer's time and attention conservatively. There's no right answer.
Genera itself is commercial software, if you have a licence to use it then you may as well just compile the emulator for OS X, I can't see any reason to have an emulated Alpha layer as well.

Someone could try compiling either the MIT or TI Explorer emulators to js I guess.
Distributed Nmap Port Scanning with DNmap Megacluster
I am amazed someone has found the definitive mac setup. Here i thought CLI guys are still debating the merits of vim vs emacs. I guess i'll file this away under "presumptuous".
Sometimes it is easier to find out if people are willing to pay for it by writing a little bit of code. The challenge is knowing how much is a little bit and that "proof of concept" applies just as much to possibile-to-sell as possible-to-implement.
Database hacking spree on US Army, NASA, and others costs gov’t millions
Why does the new Lego scientist work all night?
I'd have to disagree there. No matter how good a developer you are, if you're in a rush, you're not going to output the same quality. There's always going to thousands of decisions in a programmers head where they could take time to make something more efficient. If time is the top priority, then well designed code isn't.

And for what it's worth, I don't think that code needs to be perfect. If you're testing out an idea, your code may just need to be good enough to test the idea. Then when the idea has been validated, you can worry about perfecting the code.
On the topic of Pokemon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5T81yHkHtI
I purchased the Lightphoria 10,000 Lux light and used it last winter for the first time (I'm in my 50s). It had a slight, but noticeable effect on my mood. I pointed it at the ceiling for 30 minutes while I got dressed in the morning. It definitely seemed to help. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004JF3G08
Being able to set a very high limit for my history file and to share history between instances is a major usability feature in zsh for me. Not being able to do that is honestly reason enough to rule out an alternative shell.
Great article. This is something that, logically, makes a ton of sense... yet very few entrepreneurs do.

I published a Slideshare last week with some tactical tips on performing the interviews: http://www.slideshare.net/ZacharyCohn/18-customer-interview-...

[Full disclosure- my company teaches big companies about this stuff. We publish a lot of free content as A) Content marketing, but B) as a way to help our startup friends.]
All of those, including Google are B2C companies at its core(I know the first 3 sell ads, but they'd be useless without consumers).

If you're selling to consumers, you need to know what they want, because asking them won't yield useful answers. Who would have told you "I want a text box where I can type 140 characters about how I feel" 6 years ago?

If you're selling to businesses however, you need to do customer and market research.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=3ee_1381017749 is a copy of the article. Please correct if I am wrong.
The self-infliction is electing politicians like Kirchner who don't try to spend time and effort improving their infrastructure and stability and attracting investment to build new things. Instead, they prefer to borrow money to deliver handouts to the populace, then when they can't repay the money, default on their debts and take over the local operations of foreign firms. (This is before we even get into the suppression of the media and other overtures of authoritarianism...)

Not that the poorest of Argentinians aren't in great need of some form of aid like those handouts, but sacrificing the argentinian nation's economic future works out to be a BAD PLAN in the end.
"This recession will never end".

"We've reached a permanent plateau".

etc
This run doesn't even use the latest tech (or he might intentionally be playing a slower-but-safer route to facilitate commentary); I think he shaved another three minutes off by --

* tightening up the run to the village (by supersliding sooner)

* not needing to die on Gohma (you can glitch through the dungeon door that closes)

* skipping the tower collapse entirely (by falling through the map, which he discusses briefly as "impossible for a human to do" in the parent's video).

Here's a link to his best run ever: http://zeldaspeedruns.com/speedruns/4514
How Much Time is Necessary for Website Testing
I realize, but whatever server is making the API calls needs unrestricted access to the key and the encrypted tokens. So if server is compromised, the access tokens are necessarily compromised too, aren't they?
What are the historical estimates of success for the sell-first case? Having both figures is necessary for perspective.
Great work. That said, the guide mixes personal preferences eg. using Chrome and Alfred with things that are indubitably essentials like git, making "definitive" a stretch. Perhaps this could be separated into sections?
How do you know those are the three most important features until you've talked to a bunch of customers who tell you they are?
Today's forecast for where I live is a low of -11 C and up to 20cm of snow. I couldn't be happier. The local ski-hills will open that much sooner! I actually feel a little bit sorry for those living in San Francisco. Summer goes away but you never get to enjoy real winter activities. If you're complaining about winter in SF, you should probably either move someplace warmer or someplace colder.

Really, all it takes to enjoy winter is finding a winter activity you can look forward to. If you live someplace without winter, perhaps you should pick a sport to engage in only during the winter. Hell, SF must have at least one curling rink.
but but but boost c++11 lambdas c++14

do you even program in cpp
I think he meant international ATMs (outside Arg).
That's kind of the point of this article though. He's pointing out the flaw in the "code first" approach. He started out that way and wound up wasting years of his life. The "hackers" of news.ycombinator.com are (or should be) business-minded hackers (it's kind of the point of ycombinator). This kind of reminder is always helpful.
Hehe, lighten up. The definitive part is to make the title stand out.
A "business model" can mean a for-profit enterprise as well as an open source project solving a pain point and showcasing your skills. The questions customer development asks can be used for the open source project too, with great effect.
I like H. L. Mencken's quote for this: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
This sentiment is a bit like saying "sailors don't sail because they have somewhere to go. Sailors sail because they want to sail."

It may be true if you're on a lake or in a bay, know the area well, and your intention is to just go and flex your sailing muscles. To practice, enjoy, check out something you're aware of but haven't actually navigated, or something else that's similarly within easy reach.

It loses its applicability when you consider that, no, some sailors actually do have destinations. And some trips are long or difficult enough that they do in fact require planning, specific goals, timelines, and all manner of other preparation.

I'm sure it's not a perfect metaphor, but the point is that the artificial limitation of "hackers hack to hack" is short-sighted and fundamentally flawed. Some do, some don't, and I would say most are somewhere in between. But please don't make the mistake -- on behalf of others -- of defining the entire community in terms of your preconceptions about what hackers do or don't value or attempt in an absolute sense.
"Construction is the most hazardous job. It is more dangerous than mining and agriculture."

Interesting if true. I had no idea.
CrashPlan, Linode, Humble Bundle
How do you know what demographic to engage in until you have a rough sketch of a product?

You have to choose something to start with, and starting with a few tech features is absolutely valid.
that's why a lot of products fail. They are solving problems nobody has.
Read the article, it's not code edit distance, it's AST edit distance. If the extracted function was the same as the code inline, I think this would have little effect, though that might depend on the AST parsing.
I certainly wasn't advising against decentralizing. Only warning against thinking of it as an easily implemented no-brainer, a la "just decentralize everything, and everything is going to start working smoothly, like magic". Naive libertarianism hasn't proved to be more effective than naive Communism, and most people including myself believe it isn't.
Late comment but: I look at it as a necessary evil. I usually solve it by having a note of the intermediate understandings / thought process on OneNote when I am debugging something deep. It probably takes 2 minutes to get back on the train when disturbed. Yes - I do debug production systems / file system level issues / Storage level issues etc. And yes I am a senior engineer who keeps getting walkin / IM requests.

The flip side of saying no to meetings/walk ups is that the senior won't be doing a good job of unblocking the team. It is a huge waste to leave a bunch of junior engineers solving the same issues that you had solved years ago. Mentoring takes a hit and morale takes a dive in that case.
Flash is a plugin that lives inside browsers, a browser is... not. It's an entirely self-contained application.
No, you only pay in advance when you take the bus. When you take a cab/taxi, you set the rate in advance, but only pay at the end (when the currency is less valuable).
Indeed. A workaround would be to introduce some infix operators (there are various lisps that do so), so you could use something like '$' for function application and end up with a syntax like Haskell.

Of course, this is a terrible idea and very un-lispy, because one of the key benefits of lisp is that it's simple to parse. Introducing infix operators destroys that simplicity.

Another workaround, which I quite like, is to simply remove all the "lisp syntax" entirely, and edit a tree directly using a syntax directed editor.
"sub-optimal use of that money for the common good?" -- isn't that how communism started?
The word hacker has been twisted into oblivion.

Just assume that any mention to 'hacker' in Hacker News has nothing to do with hacking, but with entrepreneurship.
Ask HN: Similar ideas – me vs. funded startup
I just found a start up that is working on something very similar to a project I have in mind, should I contact them about it? I didn't plan to try to monetize it as they are, and there's some differences but I think they could really benefit from my ideas.

Should I try to join them (even as an intern) or to, in some way, compete with them?
Agreed that it's a little mixed with my personal flavor of how I use my mac. Although I think Alfred with Dash is essential for development, it's a personal preference of mine.
I'll take notice, and next time it will be clearer
Great. I like those interactive fiction and will play Lost pig :)
What is missing is some sort of save game option via web storage. And maybe you should give some example links on the first page.
bookmarked
IMO the sample is skewed by the fact that companies nowadays only rarely go to IPO.

In the 90s even the shitty companies went to IPO. Their shittiness inflated the PE figures.

Nowadays shitty companies don't go to IPO. They fail silently, bought out by some other company or just shuttered without warning. The easiest exit now is to sell to one of Facebook, Google, Microsoft or Apple. Retail investors don't get burnt, so almost nobody in the mass media cares. Professional investors generally don't advertise their cockups, so life goes on in blissful ignorance.

Because these companies don't go to IPO, there's no public data on their performance.

So in fact the current bubble could be as bad, or indeed worse, and there's no way to tell because the data point being used (PE for post-IPO companies) is not based on comparable samples.

I think that the data on the SF housing market might be a better indicator of how much money is chasing tech right now, since that's a major sink for it.
Yep.

Even for just houses: consider framing, or doing roof work--walking around on joists is not really safe.
Recruiting Engineers Who Aren’t Scared to Talk to People
The DZone Essential Core Python Cheat Sheet
I live in Alaska - four+ feet of snow in the winter, 20 below or colder for months at a time, dark from 4pm to 9am, etc. Personally, winter sucks, and it keeps me inside even more than typical. It just causes problems (cars don't like the cold very much, among other things) and makes me miserable. I dread every day the temperature drops, and I'm not looking forward to snowfall.
I like this idea, but I would imagine they would force you to maintain the canary (which is clear communication, even if the information was communicated by absence). Legally this hasn't been tested.
I would be interested in seeing the list of tech companies this stat is based off of. 5.6 seems really low to me seeing that FB, zynga, linkedin are all valued at hundreds of times sales.

Guessing these tech companies are not consumer software companies, but maybe hardware / manufacturing companies or something
I suffer from SAD. I didn't know it for years too.

It was just that I ran into my dark phases, but had no actual clue how, or why.

It was my psychologist, who asked the pertinent question years ago: Is there some sort of pattern, or rhythm to this ordeal?

Well, no shit Sherlock! It always seems to happen betwen October and March.

He recommended a light and I got myself a Philips Energy Light, like 5 years ago and it makes huge difference.

I still feel shitty, during most of late Autumn and early spring. But half an hour under the lamp, sipping green tea and usually reading whatever made life so much better.

In addition: I'll head off for a month in Asia in January. That helps a lot too.

Lack of light can seriously affect some people.

This may not be a solution if you suffer from depression.

Get help! If you suffer from depression. Really! I mean it! It can kill you!

But for me, 30 minutes a day, under the light makes a world of a difference.
Don't bother. HN is libertarian leaning thus will defend military spending and fight any criticism of the US military or its massive spending to the death.

I'm not even going to go into how a lot of that spending, if freed up, would go toward endeavors that are not military related and to a parallel timeline we can never know. Imagine NASA with 10 or 50x the budget. Or NSF with 10x the budget, etc. We'd probably be typing this on a moonbase or on a cottage on Alpha Centauri's earth-like planet.

Instead we fawn over the peanuts that falls out of the elephants mouth and praise its generosity for feeding the hungry.
How hard it would be to add Windows support?

EDIT: Just a question, not a request.
"Economists aren't arguing that we should inflate our way out of debt--they are arguing that we should return to the historical norm"

The historical norm IS inflating your way out of debt. You just contradicted yourself. Seriously, do you think debt gets REPAID?
None of these features, except the capture clause, are things that anyone has to learn to use C++ lambdas; they should know these other features anyway, from other parts of the language.

The late return type syntax (`-> type`) works with nearly all functions (`auto fn(foo) -> bar { ... }`), the `throw()` (now `noexcept`) specification has been used for long time, and `mutable` is a well-known syntax for potentially const objects; so the lambda syntax is, or at least should be, unsurprising.

To say it's ugly is not saying much. We all know C++ is ugly. This is a given. But singling out lambda syntax, which is comparatively easy to grasp and largely consistent with the language, doesn't really make a case.
Also, writing enough code to build a minimal demo is often necessary to validate technical viability and to ease customer development, as having something to show helps kickstart the conversation and stimulates feedback.
Facebook and friend are losing content, then you lose people, then you are finished.
Awesome summary of JavaScript's dangerous corners. I wish I had read this about 6 months ago, before I started writing a lot of JavaScript. I think I've been burned by each of these.
I'm actually still curious about your anecdotal experience, though, if there's anything you'd like to share. Just because quants are not evil "in principle" doesn't mean there might not be certain personality traits that pop up often. I don't know anybody who works in that space.
He's not "complaining about winter". It's not the temperature; it's the (lack of) sunshine.

Your second paragraph is a good suggestion. Getting outside while there is daylight will help.
That has changed a great deal over the last 10 years. Modern C++ implementations are quite stable, and the push for and uptake of C++11 support has been quite rapid. Most of the new standard was implemented before the final draft was even published.
Same guy, faster run: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3HT0--ieUY
That's how you get your 11% performance gains!
I have used that exact Wake-Up light model for about a year. It has had a marginal effect, in that I wake "naturally" (before the sound alarm goes off) about 1 night in 20. As a simple source of bright light, it performs as you would expect -- with the extra benefit that my tired morning self does not have to bother with turning it on.

I would rank its usefulness above 0, but below a consistent bed time, and so far, below vitamin D (3250 IU in the morning).
I know that this is just a demo, but it featured a very laggy map on Android, an ugly menu bar and scrollbars on Windows, and perhaps more importantly, UIs on desktop that looked like nothing but scaled up phone UIs. To the extent that this is representative of the real thing - which, again, could be 'not very much' in the future - useful in a pinch, but not something I'd want to use on a daily basis. (I don't think there is even currently an API to populate the menu bar...)
You are exactly the exception I discussed - the world-class developer.

Did you even read the post?
I write code so I can make money... so that in the future, I can write code without worrying about making money. if that makes sense. Because right now, the vast majority of hackers spend 90% of their living hours writing code that doesn't satisfy them intellectually.