skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The piece is written completely in reverse, spreading popular myths as opposed to debunking them. Actually it does take a lot of money to start a new business. True, an "average startup" probably "gets going" on 25K or less, but you don't want to head where average startups usually go (oblivion).

And just for the record, 25K is about 3 months of modest living for a team of 3 in SF/NYC/Boston. Then you should start generating ~20K/month of revenue to support yourself.
Zero to 20K in 3 months? Good luck with that.

An "average" successful startup goes through several rounds of funding, just look at some recent exits and see how many of them took 25K or less.

About bank financing: the "myth" is true. You won't use it. Banks always tie their loans to either solid revenue history or personal obligations of the founders. It won't be any different from taking a home equity, don't do it.

Tech startups aren't restaurants: they have zero revenue for the first 1..3 years. That's why looking at federal reserve stats for small businesses is pointless. Getting a loan to run a roofing business isn't the same as getting a loan to sit and code for a year.
How Much Is A Petabyte?
Norvig in his essay 'Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years':

"If you want, put in four years at a college (or more at a graduate school). This will give you access to some jobs that require credentials, and it will give you a deeper understanding of the field, but if you don't enjoy school, you can (with some dedication) get similar experience on the job. In any case, book learning alone won't be enough. "Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter" says Eric Raymond, author of The New Hacker's Dictionary. One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub."

http://norvig.com/21-days.html
Yeah, the guy was obviously looking to do nothing more than confirm (and push) his bias.

The quality of his captcha is also questionable, since it was apparently not recaptcha.
Are you sure her calorie expenditure is really higher than yours? You may just have a faster metabolism.
Having worked on something very similar to Sampa, this was a fascinating read. Thank you for posting it.
Re: You can go to the bathroom whenever you want at Microsoft
I'd like to counter that with "IDE's are detrimental to programming because they enable bloatware to be produced on a scale that would be almost unthinkable without them".

The number of Java library calls is a nice example, what an unbelievable overkill of library functions.
I live in an apartment building and in the basement we have storage lockers. Someone had a master lock on one, so I tried it out. I was losing confidence by try 95 (out of 100) - but it opened on try 96! Pretty cool.
For all of those folks who are saying IE is a piece of junk, you should consider:

1) IE is a REALLY stable/reliable piece of software. I don't think IEs failings are remotely technical. They are the strategic choices they made.
2) This guy is an high-level engineer. At Microsoft, I believe that gives him a seat at the table in terms strategic decisions, but it's a big table.
I don't know. I just ask questions. I don't have any good answers.

I've tried to figure it out every time I've had to hire someone. The best luck I've had is with prior knowledge of the person (worked with them in the past, knew them from an Open Source project, etc.). I'm suspicious of the network hiring process, though, as it seems to narrow the pool too much, and certainly doesn't scale. I think it can also bring about quality degradation over time as people bring in people they like rather than people that are the best.

I just have a sneaking suspicion that some of the things that Google does wrong could possibly be attributed to hiring predominantly from the "teacher's pet" archetype.
Where is Everyone?
You didn't get to the point about how if you died anything but alone and penniless, you hadn't done your job. To me, that doesn't sound like a business plan for anyone on HN.

You committed the same sin the article was talking about: you celebrated it while ignoring its major point. ;-)
People who have "fire-in-the-belly" will usually have something to show for it besides just good grades.
I hate the idea of tying front end to backend. Maybe it's prejudice.
It used to be against the rules, but I don't see that particular text in the guidelines anymore.
> 25K is about 3 months of modest living for a team of 3 in SF/NYC/Boston

An excellent reason not to do a startup in one of those cities. They are expensive to live in and full of tempting and expensive distractions. If you're serious about bootstrapping a web startup and can choose where you live, then living in an unglamorous place with a great net connection is one of the easiest ways to stretch the time you have before funds run out.
Computer hardware chart
A new fascinating Linux kernel vulnerability
From the Microspotting About page (which is a Microsoft page):

Oh and PS: You might notice that I use all manner of social media sites like Flickr and YouTube on Microspotting. You might notice that I publish the site using an open source content management system. Before you get all “ZOMG, TRAITOROUS MICROSOFTIE!!!11!1!!” understand this: I don’t buy into the idea that working at Microsoft means you can’t use competitors’ tools. In fact, I think that’s the best way to stay in touch with a constantly shifting, super exciting industry. I’m a Web 2.0 geek, so I use whatever tools interest me at the moment — regardless of who makes them. Working at Microsoft does not equal flunky.
Go, but don't use the wifi, or swim in the pools unless you've had ALL your shots.
I'm not SwellJoe, but I'll jump in to recommend Sony's MDR7506 headphones. These aren't consumer junk. They're comfortable, sound good, and are widely used by professionals for soundboard, editing, and broadcasting work. Next time you go to a show, take a look at the soundboard - chances are the folks working it will be wearing 7506 headphones.

I think they're about 1/2 to 1/3 the price of those Beyerdynamics, too.
Augmented Reality DJ scratching [video]
I have no idea about input devices, but this I agree completely with:

> In future people will increasingly do their own software as programming is already taught in some schools as a basic skill.

Especially scripting-languages have evolved hugely, and I think we're pretty close to where "regular" office-people will be expected to put together small scripts to get things done. Instead of going through a complicated change management process to add a button to some in-house app to save some time, users will increasingly be empowered to script such a thing themselves.

Programming is increasingly de-mystified, and it's really no harder tying together a couple of objects in, say, Python, than to do a proper mail merge in Office.
Not exactly - for example, I depend on fabric, PIP, easy_install, nose, pylint and others. In this case, it's not a matter of fixing upstream on a per-project basis, it's fixing distutils as this is "magical" behavior I (and others) have seen, and that's not a pile of gators I (or I suspect you) would want to wade into. For example read the following threads:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-July/090259...
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-July/090356...

And so on. I agree wholeheartedly though - library-only dependencies are stupid simple.
I think the biggest change coming to the computing world is iPhone-type devices. These will become our PCs. We'll have hand-held apps, but we'll also be able to plug them into real monitors and keyboards. So one of the biggest challenges will be making one device work in both kinds of environments. I think the other challenge will be how to create virtual systems within these devices, so that we can use the same device for personal and work uses, yet keep the 2 completely separate from each other.
That's true to some extent but there are those who really figured it out on their own and there are those who had people holding their hand. I think that is the distinction we're trying to make when referring to somebody as an autodidact.
It's not full calories that can be metabolized by the human body, though, that's the point.

I've always had the same question regarding alcohol. Alcohol has a lot of calories, but I've never been able to conclusively figure out whether those calories are actually metabolizable. It seems to me that since alcohol is broken down by the liver, it should be a net drain on calories.
Yeah, well, it's (mostly) a rant, though I like the kickstart thing I put together. I wouldn't have posted this to hacker news though, fwiw
It was for me. In high school and most of college, I refused to make myself pretty. It was a symbolic rejection of that whole social strategy, and I did think it was a dichotomy. I was going to be smart, and that was all.

It wasn't until I had been a professional for a few years that I changed my mind. I noticed that the women who I really respected as programmers were also all stunningly beautiful. I read up on it a bit and realized that it's just another skill, and not a particularly difficult one. Overnight I blossomed and became pretty.

But it didn't happen until I was twenty-six. And it's one thing to look beautiful for yourself and your husband; I'm not sure I'd have put in the time to compete with sixteen-year-olds.
We are still in stealth mode so I can't tell you that what. I can tell you that we are building a distributed application in Java that does very, very high-speed process of customer data to provide near real-time predictions of customer behaviour.
I've worked with some terrible programmers that have Stanford CS degrees, and one of the best programmers (CTE..) I've ever worked with also has a degree from Stanford CS. It's just not a very good metric to determine skill.

A university education demonstrates a commitment to studying for a reasonable period of time, which in itself is something valuable, however, anyone that has had more than a decade of industry relevant experience is self taught. After that time, what you learned in school pales into insignificance compared with what you (hopefully) have learned on the job (and in side projects).

The computing landscape changes every decade or so. The last one has seen dynamic languages come to the forefront and be actually used outside of school projects. And of course web development is completely new. It bought with it an entirely new sense of scale (think of Facebook's image serving needs, or Google's pagerank number matrix math)

I'm glad for Zeke and I'm glad for MSFT that they have hiring criteria that make sense. People have wrongly in my opinion written them off in favor of the new hotness (GOOG), but I am a little reluctant to be so hasty. While its true that I haven't used (or needed) a MSFT product for a while, I am also not naive enough to realize that a software developer in San Francisco isn't really typical of a computer user, when averaged over the globe.
I don't think the title is incorrect. He makes the point that even a 10 calorie imbalance per day add up to 1kg of fat in a year, so these small differences are important if you really try to tune your diet to exactly match some calorie count.
yes, when the choice is between "get over it" and "cry about it" the latter is clearly the superior option
I don't think I understand what you are asking.
A while back I suggested swapping two letters in calorie to define a new measure: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/06/colarie-new-way-of-measure-c...
I'm also a self-taught programmer, but I think that our shared view that people like us are more imaginative, etc. is biased due to our personal experiences.
HN is not served by Apache. The Arc source includes the http server.
previously submitted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=694545
For me, it's because the challenges are complex and the problems lend themselves to being broken into manageable pieces. If I, instead, wanted to build a space shuttle, there are some real barriers to entry (not the least of which is the few millions needed to get me some rocket fuel and so forth), but with computers it's just me, the debugger and vi. I can do anything I want, limited only by my skill and imagination. I like those kinds of limitations...
Yay, a fellow SI nazi! :)

I remember being helplessly confused when I moved to the US before I figured out that what the Americans call a "calorie" is actually a kcal. A cal is the scientific unit, normally used with the k prefix, and in Sweden food labels (and even our school home economics textbook) use kcal (and KJ).

I'm kind of used to the US using weird-ass units by now, but the fact that they just decided to drop the prefix on some unit (presumably because they didn't want to subject the public to learning that k means thousands) is too much.
DIY Projects that Harness the Power of the Sun
What I find interesting is that there's no asterisk next to the 50PB figure for all written works. That may be a reasonable estimate for all published written works, but the internet, as indicated by how much data Google processes in the same diagram, has allowed the volume of written, recorded knowledge and thoughts of mankind to expand dramatically.
Except that the energy need of a human is not 2500 ps3-hours/day, it's 2500 kcal per day. The article does actually use absolute numbers in quite a few places, and there the units do matter.
Not for awhile, ebook readers provide a substantial lower experience to the printed page, though there are upsides to digital books the experience of reading them is not the same as a normal book. Whereas video/music are still delivered in fundamentally the same way - we use speakers for music and screens for tv, just the storage mechanism changed.
Peaceful Co-existence: Reasons to Love Google
The Case Against Adobe Flex / Flash
I think it's pretty sustainable. You should approach it as a lifestyle change, though, not a diet. That means don't make any tradeoffs in the process you're not willing to live with for the rest of your life. For me, that means find the occasional space for pie, and chocolate, and pizza . . .

But once you've got the initial engineering figured out, it's just a case of knowing what things cost in unusual circumstances. A little mental effort for a healthy body weight is a tradeoff I'll gladly make for the rest of my life.
How different is an electric bicycle from an electric motorcycle?

See, I rather ride an electric hayabusa or a ninja.

Before, there was a difference between them, now that both can be powered by electricity the line blurs.
while true, we also have had interesting (in my opinion, at least) things flagged and deleted in the past because they weren't topical to the community.
http://docs.python.org/distutils/setupscript.html#installing...

"The only clever feature is that if the first line of the script starts with #! and contains the word “python”, the Distutils will adjust the first line to refer to the current interpreter location. By default, it is replaced with the current interpreter location. The --executable (or -e) option will allow the interpreter path to be explicitly overridden."
10 years from now.. too short to tell, but 20/30 years from now, I have strange thoughts.

I do believe that in one day, Information Technology will invade each place, home, school, office, road... anything that exists in everyday life... I dream that everything in life will be connected and Internet will become more important than oxygene, something like cars, TV and cellphone now.

The IT world will be very promising, it'll be big and no one can control it. I think. In my opinion. The IT market will be so big that even giant companies like Google and Microsoft will be nothing rather than companies dominating a niche with a considerable market share.

I think in the future, the IT will grow strong, companies like msft will grow their sales but loose more market share, as the IT growth is stronger.

I think it's time for many "big" companies formed of 3 or 4 poeple. Look at startup now, it's just the begining, how was the web in 95? it was a few number of websites, they made good income and dominated the web (like yahoo.com and msn.com) now they still make money, but the web grow in a way they can't control it and the market is far big than their potentiel.

I think the future of IT will be so complicated that you can never, anyone, understand it... many new things everyday, startups launched each seconds... and many news, ideas and discoveries... It'll be fantastic, but we'll miss the days of the simple Hacker News interface.

meet you in 2040, hope this thread still exist...
We both went to religious schools. Unlike public schools, teachers could and would comment on things that probably were none of their business. They'd also encourage and discourage certain types of behaviour outside of the academic domain. In elementary school, a teacher once kept me in at recess to talk about my older sister (she was 19, pregnant, and having the baby). Pissed me off...
Graphic of Michael Jackson's hits over time
This will be solved with green-renewable energy
Review My App: Whatsyourbeat.com
Whats Your Beat is a media contact database specifically for public relations. Public relation professionals constanly need to create media lists to contact journalists. Whats Your Beat is an alternative to the big companies that do this that charge thousands of dollars in license fees. Allows you to add media contacts and search for contacts.

www.whatsyourbeat.com
Why would you give an iPhone to your 2 year old?
AI War: How one guy created an RTS game with a formidable AI in only 7 months
Get the Best out of Bing
I call Markov bot on this contributor. That is six metaphors pureed together in one sentence, which may be a new HN record.
> Working at Microsoft does not equal flunky.

I have been told that Microsoft employees are discouraged (perhaps even forbidden) from contributing to Free Software projects. Can you refute this?
> "The Chinese have a hundred million people on electric bikes," says Jamerson. "That means a hundred million potential customers" for electric cars.

That's the kind of absurd and ill-informed thinking that brought GM to bankruptcy (and yes, this guy is a former GM employee). I moved to China a month ago, and I was astonished to see the number of e-bikes here. There are a lot of cars too, but they are clearly not practical. While US is designed for cars (highways, suburbia life, big stores with parking, etc...) in China owning a car seems extremely inconvenient: No places to park, horrendous traffic jams, stress, narrow streets, not even mentioning the cost of the car itself and maintenance.

In the city I live (Shenyang) a bus ride is 1 yuan (US$0.14). A taxi ride is between 8 to 20 yuan (US$3). Plenty of streets have bike lanes and every store has free bike / e-bike parking. The ROI in owning a car must be ridiculous, and it is very inconvenient.

To believe that every e-bike owner one day will be a electric car owner is totally naive IMO.
Spherical Geometry Applet : Parallel Transport
I had to check whois to be sure this wasn't a parody. What are these guys thinking?
Google Building Chrome Base at Universities in Exchange for Absorbing IT Costs
A pretty cool applet which demonstrates parallel transport:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_transport

On a curved surface, the angle which the arrows twists around a closed loop is proportional to the area inside the loop.
Comment I left on his blog:

I can't imagine how much that sucks.

On the other hand, you go to be your own boss and run with something for several years. Frankly, I don't even see what the point of Sampa was. Geocities was around in 1996. Maybe if you had started early enough you could have sold before the business model issues became so critical you weren't able to ignore them, but realistically that was your only exit strategy, much like geocities and youtube.
She watches videos, "reads" books (scanned images of picture books), plays games, listens to music and practices "typing". It's now a spare, so it doesn't have a calling plan. So just like a video iPod really.

I can tell you that multi-touch has been a lot easier to teach than mouse use.
The electric bikes I've seen are lighter and have thinner wheels.

And you can cycle on an electric bike.
Because of this:

input a,b,c
x = (-b+sqrt(b^2-4*a*c))/(2*a)
output x

It feels sooo good!

Solving problems, finding solutions, it is an adrenaline rush, an addiction, like playing god with bits and creating universes inside computers.

That's how it feels.
It's all about you. You are not a good programmer because you went to a good school, or because you started learning on your own. You are a good programmer because you are a good programmer. It's a combination of traits that the individual aquires during all the points in life before the one in which we declare him a "good programmer". For every self-thought good programmer, you can name one with a degree. And vice versa.

The point of this article is not the way you learn to program. The point is how the company attracted someone and inspired him to fullfill his potential, and in the end be a true asset to the company. The right to go to the toilet whenever you want is just a simple simbol for a good working environment. A song of a caged nightingale is never his best.
It isn't? Why not?
I guess "making an argument" is one of the things people learn in university. :-P
I've been living in Beijing for the last two months and the situation is basically identical here except that taxis are more expensive and there's a well-developed subway.

The real trick though is that most people just have normal bikes. The people I see most on e-bikes either work as delivery people (McDonald's is notorious for this: they wear a red uniform and zoom around on major streets) or seem to have to carry some weight for other purposes.
The best programmer I ever knew had no CS degree. The best engineer I ever knew did.
What I like the most about your story is how you framed the solution to your problem subjectively. You improve yourself instead of destroying them. Everybody wins.
I never knew about this trick. The only one I know is how to pop the lock open and then reset the code.

This is really cool though.
my first love in programming was 'socket'.

when i create a program that can communicate each other, i just realize that the limit in programming is infinite. it's feel like a magic in your hand. a wizard of binary.
I'm surprised by the amount of negative reaction the Wikipedia stance is getting, seems pretty sensible to me, not to mention ethically sound.

This guy doesn't seem to have much of a point. He thinks this is a case of "tragedy of the commons" when really, since you can't use up a digital image by looking at it or duplicating it, it's really a case of Public Goods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good) and the problems they have.

Why build a lighthouse if you can't charge people and exclude those who don't pay? Standard answer, get the government to do it and force people to pay via taxation. Since most of these museums are government funded already, problem solved.

I also don't understand the reference to the Van Gogh (http://www.xconomy.com/national/2009/07/17/art-isnt-free-the...). It seems like US institutions are pulling the same kind of nonsense, even after a court ruling against it.