skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, but the good weather and the fine wine make my little hole quite nice -- even if it is a little expensive and overcrowded....oh wait, I take that all back... don't come to California, it really sucks like apotheon said.
It takes a long time to shut down a company. We stopped working on Snaptalent almost 4 months ago. I'm hoping to get some time in the near future to write some posts going into more detail about what went wrong. There are definitely a lot of takeaways that are being practically applied to my new project.
Good for all grandmas, like mine, being constantly spammed by them.
Developers started flocking to the App Store because they saw a great opportunity, a gold rush (fueled like never before by media).

If a consistent part of them would leave now (and I believe they won't), it would be even more appealing for other to join since there would be less competition.
Roll Your Own URL Shortener - Lessn by Shaun Inman
Which money?
They were pretty big in their time, the fact that they're going belly up is a good indication that the writing is really on the wall for publishers.
From the comments there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system)
The problem with steps 2 and 3 is that most of the time people aren't really sure they know what they want. They may have narrowed things down to a category, such as laptops as you mentioned, but even then you'd be hard pressed to find someone that absolutely KNOWS they want a laptop. Maybe a netbook + desktop would be a better combo? Or an iMac-style nettop. Furthermore, at any given time people are usually in the market for more than one thing, all at various stages of the buying cycle.

So now if we can simplify and treat all cases as "I don't know what I'm looking for" then follow-up to that is "I'm looking".

In that case the experience can be optimized around the looking and searching. I think the key concept in searching is, unsurprisingly, speed. Let me look at a lot of products quickly, let me research an individual product quickly, jump back out quickly, jump between categories, jump between different lists, sorts, filters, etc.

And I think pg is missing something, as the path doesn't end when a product purchase is made. You have all the nitty gritty of the actual transaction + shipping, but then you have post-purchase life as well. Most stores have you buy the product and then have you go somewhere else for support. Sure you can review the product on the store, but what if you want to hack it? or you have a problem? or you want to upgrade? etc etc. Is it up to the manufacturer at that point? What if you can't find the manufacturer's support resources?

We're doing some interesting things here at ProductWiki, but our goal is to create a great base of content and data. I imagine that one day a company will take the open data to create a really nice and innovative shopping experience.
Some feedback here: http://www.listia.com/auction/2067

Really crappy that I can't edit this. The title says 512MB chip (which it is), I pasted from the wrong notepad into the description which says 2gb (which its not). But I cant edit it, or delist or anything.. Sorry
(2 days ago by suedehed)
I think PG's point is that NewEgg only lists products sold by NewEgg. Amazon is a little different since they have affiliated retailers, but they still don't have everything.
Every mainstream web application suite ever built appears to have "reinvented" single sign-on.
Pity he didn't learn Lisp.
This whole link rot is massively over stated. Most short urls are used on Twitter. Who is reading old Tweets on Twitter? Almost nobody since Twitter is about now, not yesterday.

By the time you switch over to some 301works archive the links will have lost 99% of their relevancy.
the previous discussion when it was last submitted.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294
The indented text indicates that he was quoting the linked article -- the awkward phrasing is Wired's.
Not going belly-up. They are just re-structuring debt using the bankruptcy process.

Still, not a good-thing.
I'd read that before, but I think I needed it today.

Maybe someone should set up a cron job to submit that talk to HN every 3 months.
My original macbookpro is still alive and well and withstood very heavy use. Granted, I needed to replace the battery a few times, originally because mine was within the serial # range of defective batteries, but each time those changes were covered by my warranty. The computer is now almost four years old.

I suspect that you can find someone with an anecdote describing a perfectly functioning mac and one that exploded. The same such anecdotes likely also exist for people running Thinkpads, Latitudes, et al.
Even though I'm someone who "has money," I find this point very relevant.

I've wrestled a bit with the OP's question in more than one context for years, though primarily in the case of calculating how much a particular position's total compensation is worth, making sure to consider commute time, for example. It also comes in handy when trying to figure out the value of non-sick time off, such as holidays, which is not convertible to cash.

My current attempt is to use a number as a factor of my effective hourly rate, but that has been unsatisfactory. If I'm unemployed, that factor approaches zero. Somewhere around 2000 hours annually, it goes above 1.

That is, if the factor is 1.1, I'd consider it worth my while to get paid 10% over my effective "normaly" hourly rate, to sacrifice free time by doing work on the side, assuming cash is the only reward. The reverse is also true, though at an objective rate: vacation is worth a factor of 1 by definition, since it's convertible.

I tend to do (read: have Calc) do these computations on pre-tax money, though post-tax money is what's personally real to me. Either way, it doesn't much matter, since, at any given point, the question for me is of marginal, not overall, value.

I've been assuming total hours, but that's obviously false, since I'm much less likely to take side gigs if my "day" job is paying enough, raising my free time factor as high as 1.5. I'm also more likely to take vacation (since I'd be making a free time "profit" of .5).

In the context of the original question, my salary converted to hourly is a close enough approximation to how I value my time. From an employer's standpoint, I use the rule of thumb of $2/minute (like a 900 number!) as the cost of lost productivity for wasting my (or anyone else's productive) time. This, of course, only scales to a company of moderate size, as I'm sure most readers here are quite aware.
On the other hand, the more manufactured background you have, the more likely something is to trip you up, either because you misremembered it when talking to somebody or you ran into somebody who was involved in the real world situation and knows you were not. The best way to get away with a fake past is to be vague, but not so vague as to arouse people's curiosity or suspicions.
You ask: "So why promote delicious bookmarking at all!?"

Well, it seems to me that you should spend more time asking yourself how to serve your visitors rather than how to serve yourself.

The reason so much of the internet sucks is because publishers spend too much time trying to get people on their site by doing SEO and all that crap, then they crowd up the best parts of their website with obtrusive ads (a bit like the ad bar right above your articles).

Instead of all that, just focus on creating good content. I'm not trying to be mean, that just makes a better internet for all of us.
OOO still preserves sequential semantics, so it's not that interesting from the programmer's perspective.
I don't know, but I'm thinking something as trivial as a URL shortener isn't really something this community is going to need help with. :-)
Dear people who want their project to do well and become popular, make it easy to find out WTF your project actually is and make it obvious wherever visitors end up.

I read this blog post, didn't work out what FluidDB was. Clicked on "FluidDB" and went to the main page of the blog - no help. Clicked on "About" in the left hand column.. it's just some default page with nothing about FluidDB. Googled for FluidDB and found the official homepage at position 4. Their homepage similarly does not explain what FluidDB is at all.. groan
ILike Deal Puts Facebook In Lose/Lose Situation
The investors could have said "No, keep the money, do something else." Who would turn that down?
Are you able to talk about your dataflow language and/or compilation techniques? I'd love to hear about them, if possible, as its something I'm very interested in and am looking into myself. I've found it dificult to find information on compilation techniques for compiling a dataflow language to a traditional processor so have been making most of it up as I need, but my own work is far from optimal. Any insights you can provide here would be appreaciated.

Are you simply converting dataflow code to blocks of imperative code and have these blocks running concurrently (eg, in threads) and communicating with each other? Or is there a more elaborate instruction scheduling mechanism at work?
are you selling assets/domain? or folding into another venture?
Why I Don’t Use Twitter
Mygazines is back (scanning and sharing magazines online)
Best of luck with your future endeavors Jamie. Was a pleasure working with you and Snaptalent back in the early days. ;-) I still have one of the little post-it notes you guys sent with my checks.
So he's blogging again? Guess that email list didn't work out.
If it wasn't too difficult, big companies with loads of money would be doing it, right? Doesn't seem that many are, which suggests that the biggest and best haven't found an efficient solution they think is worth paying for.
VC's want the choice of whether or not to invest in you.

So naturally they trust your attributes alot more than others' when they are talking to you.
I thought it was relevant (and far enough away time-wise) for a repost, given the news from SnapTalent today.
It looks like the lenders are going to be the new owners, that's as much as going belly up and selling the assets to the debt holders. 'restructuring' is just to put a pretty face on it.

They seem to be losing money hand over fist, and I wonder if they're going to 'restructure' what it is that they plan to do to stop the drain and become profitable post-restructuring. Without a really good plan it is just a postponement of the inevitable.
I'm honestly surprised that more people don't know about the Martingale.
Same here. I love my G1. I don't understand why jacobian just hates it so much. I admit there are quirks and a lot of issues but I don't plan on switching to the IPhone anytime soon.
Allow resubmissions after XXX period of time.

My recent submission was "Who Can Name the Bigger Number?" This is a great article for anyone who has studied computer science, mathematics, or enjoys scientific history. It was last submitted about 180 days ago.

This article, along with other greats such as "Cargo Cult Science" etc are of interest to the community. Limiting their presence on the front page or via the RSS to a single point in time seems extra-ordinarily constricting. I would suggest that after a period of say 1 year an article is available for resubmission.
Or to randomly choose one of PG's essays every month.

This particular one was last posted almost two years ago.
The steering element is, I find, initially counter-intuitive. But my first time driving one of these boats I looked at the engine, saw how it moved where the thrust "pointed", and then it became entirely intuitive - I just needed to build the right model for how the high-level system worked, in order to get an intuitive feeling for the lower-level details.

As for the throttle, you're quite right - the twist direction to go forwards is arbitrary, but the rotating all the way in the opposite direction to reverse (which is what I wanted to highlight) makes much more intuitive sense to me than throttling down to zero, moving a lever, and then throttling back up again.
My start-up and I will soon return to Pittsburgh, fleeing NC's recent affiliate tax legislation.

What's the scoop on entrepreneurship/tech meet-ups? the refreshPittsburgh blog seems abandoned.
> Mr Gonzales used a complicated technique known as an "SQL injection attack" to penetrate networks' firewalls and steal information, the US Department of Justice said.

I'm not at all shocked that a credit card processing company has no regard for security. Also the news media should be banned from using the word "firewall".
> I dont know: I came to HN after I began hacking and doing startups (I never even called them startups till I got here) and my assumption was that 99% failed anyway as a part of the process of learning.

Same here I've been doing startups since 13, didn't even know about the dot-com boom bust at the time.
Artificial Tongue Is Sweeter Than Real Thing
Forgot Jim Clark. Really liked his story too.
"but the dingiest place in SF was cleaner than the cleanest streets near me"

Keep in mind that the shit that you stepped over on the sidewalk was probably not from dogs (if you were near Market street).
TomTom iPhone App Now Available in U.S. App Store
I don't know anybody that 'scored' that didn't fail a couple of times first. The ones that hit a home-run the first time out are the ones that you hear about all the time but they're the exceptions.

It's not a rule, but hard work definitely pays off - most of the time.
Company is being liquidated. All the other founders and I are doing separate things now.
if( userpain > effort) {

fixProblem(problem);

}

else{}
I have my favorite languages (python and C) and have gotten used to their warts. It is like a marriage, you just get used to the problems and learn to avoid the problem areas.
For kicks I think assembly is still fun to program in, e.g., the Tierra assembly language that was built by Tom Ray back in the early 90s for evolution research was fun to toy with.
Sites that help you find hot topics across the Web
Clearly dentists and doctors offices aren't a viable market.
On my blog I explore everything that has to do with designing, developing, and marketing websites. Internet marketing is an important part of an effective website.

Regarding your implication that I don't address the user's needs, one of my blog's primary topics is user experience design. Under that you'll find such posts as "Online community best practices: Reward your top users," "Web form usability: Better form submission feedback with jQuery," and "3 eye tracking studies that influenced my latest redesign." So to imply that I'm not concerned about what my users want or creating good content, you've been mislead.

Good content is important. And so is finding audiences for that good content. You need both. Good content and good traffic.
I decided to keep my predictions out of the post, but in reality I agree it is unlikely that there will be a mass exodus of developers. I do, however, wish developers would concede that they're getting what they ask for if they end up on the wrong side of an App Store policy decision. And in my more optimistic moments I hope developers understand that we do have some power to get behind fairer policies.
Of course he is! Laughing at people is the new web 2.0 business model!
It's great if it gets his Perimeter research institute going!
Yeah, Jason Calacanis is a search engine optimization specialist.
I am finishing up my PhD and I have a very direct analogy to what PG mentions.

There are multiple research groups with different success rates and what I have noticed is groups with extremes are not doing that well. By extremes I mean professors who try to micromanage and get a daily update and professors who do not care at all. In my group, we have a biweekly meeting for everyone to present what they did in 2 weeks time which makes all of us work hard but on our own terms. I think incorporating similar things in education/research will be very helpful in the long run.

Good article PG!!
Oddly, self-help gurus seem to enjoy the opposite phenomenon (i.e. those who can't, teach self-help seminars).

I remember at one point this guy Richard(?) Kiyosaki had a book "Rich Dad, Poor Dad." In it, you basically found out that Kiyosaki was (a) lying his tits off or (b) a terrible investor. You found out that he'd been bankrupt, and had run several companies into the ground. That he invested in mining companies in Russia whose value would swing 50% up and down from day-to-day - but that this didn't bother him... Wacko.

Yet, somehow, the book was a total phenomenon and made the guy huge amounts of money.
Leonid Volnitsky's git-prompt is the best git-enabled Bash script I've found.

http://github.com/lvv/git-prompt/tree/master
Of course . . . you can also use a flat rock to hammer in nails when framing a house, but a framing hammer might be a better idea. Doesn't mean it can't be done, though, especially if you're really good with rocks and already have them lying around, whereas you'd have to go to the hardware store just to buy the framing hammer.

My point was not "language X can't do project type Y," but rather that the things that put a language in the sweet spot for certain types of projects kind of inevitably pull it out of the sweet spot for other types of projects. I.e. it really is always about trade-offs. Sometimes the mere fact that you know how to use a given language is enough of a win to outweigh any potential benefits of switching to another language.
I have cut & pasted all of pg's essays onto my Palm pilot. Along with my bridge program and a bunch of other great content, I never have an excuse not to learn something.

Whenever I sense that I'm getting stagnant, I always go back and reread old faithful, "Good and Bad Procrastination".

http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

(When someone invents an ebook reader that plays bridge, I'll make the switch.)
Good essay. Just spent the weekend reading Hacker's and Painter's. Very good as well.
On the Color of Quick-UX
And how many of those failures actually pay back investors instead of burning through all their cash first?

This is quite possibly the most responsible failure I've ever read about.
Good point. Few thoughts that inspire people to get into it and could lead to a revolution:
1. Textbooks are fairly static unlike websites
2. Websites are more easily accessible
3. Books are boring to most people
4. Websites are not

Why your point is interesting to me:
The main problem in my opinion is the lack of interest in learning in general. Until a learning method appears that will actually inspire people to want to learn, no change will take place.
Humans are immensely good at concurrent thought, and really bad at sequential thought.

Consider driving. Your brain is processing millions of things in an out-of-order manner, and producing continuous motions in your hands and feet that guide the car so perfectly that few would be surprised to hear of someone driving for a lifetime without a major accident.

Same deal with many concurrent activities, like having a conversation, or playing sports, or listening to music, writing, thinking about the future, or fixing the fridge. In every case, we set our massively parallel architecture on many problems simultaneously, and then integrate a solution in real time without deadlocks or timeouts.

Humans have a corresponding weakness for sequential thought. We find it very hard to write a piece of sequential software that lasts more than a week without crashing hard or suffering from a major design flaw. We need to be taught for decades in the most advanced institutions to think sequentially and logically. Only the most elite of us ever manage to produce something that others would actually pay for, and even then we may solve a different problem for people than the one we set out to solve. (Think of startups like twitter that find that the market likes them, but for completely different reason than what they thought.)

Then we try to make people trained in sequential thought solve parallel problems, and they come up with steamy piles of tangled mess, full of deadlocks, races, and side-effects.

Our DEFAULT state is concurrent thought. We've all been trained to think otherwise, by our computers, languages, and education. We're hard on the poor folks who were carefully trained as sequentialists when they fail to make a parallel problem easy.

I work on a compiler for sequential source at a major corp by day, but my personal long-term goal is to create a compiler for a language that can form the kernel for a new school of thought separate from the sequentialists and their half-measures towards solving this problem. As hardware evolves, it will only become more like our own brains, and less like calculators and simple programmable machines.
40% of blog posts are probably babble as well - another fad.
Sorry I think the part about starting up other things is ill-advised.

TWITTER WAS A SIDE PROJECT!
Startup idea: present the user with 8 adjectives and ask them to pick the one which best describes their mood, then give them an optimal article to read as they start their day.

We'd all be more successful if we could capitalize on our good moods and not let our bad moods drag us down for long.
It's so frustrating when progress gets stuck against someone's greed. I think Google should make Android open source so everyone could commit their code to support features despite the will of Apple or mobile carriers. And this will also invite smaller vendors to use and populate Android.
Facebook's last redesign killed any lingering desires for me to use Twitter. I don't like the constant Twitter-hate some people think is necessary, but I don't feel the need to tweet, either.
Poll: How Many Processes Are You Running?
Regardless of OS how many process are running on your system?
51-60
71-80
Must be one of those guys who doesn't ask for directions.
This ranks right up there with Steve Job's Stanford speech.

It was even more powerful when pg actually delivered it. I wish a video from that night's dinner existed.
When they knew Odeo didn't have enough traction: http://www.stubbleblog.com/index.php/2009/06/the-real-lesson...
Some term sheets may not allow you to drastically switch course. I'm guessing this is more likely the larger the round.

Either way, the right thing to do is to give the investors the option to cash out.
Who knows, maybe they did ?

Maybe they felt like being free from the extra duties having 'foreign' capital brings with it.
I'm running Windows XP SP3 on my work notebook and I've tweaked the services and disabled all the startup processes. With Chrome(5 tabs), Outlook, Digsby, and Task Manger I've got 23 processes/304 threads running.
Ask HN: What's harder? Starting or Quitting?
Just read about SnapTalent shutting down and it made me wonder if quitting is much harder than starting something.

I wonder if any of you guys have thought of quitting on something you have been working on for years but cannot do so mainly because of the amount of time and effort spent on it.
>As I have said, the respect in which it is ill-defined is the imprecise definitions of the words used.

I don't see any lack of precision. We all know what it is like to see red, or to feel elated. The definitions of these words don't really seem to be relevant to the debate. At least in the philosophical literature on this stuff, questions of definition haven't arisen very often in the arguments between opposing camps.

>[consciousness obeys physics]

Well, to be precise, I also believe that consciousness "obeys" physics, I just don't think that the laws of physics explain or imply the existence of consciousness.

>and I feel the burden of proof rests more heavily on that side, considering Occam's razor.

Occam's razor is a device for choosing between explanations, but physicalism currently has no explanation of consciousness, so Occam's razor is inapplicable. Admittedly, none of the alternatives to physicalism give a deep or satisfying explanation for the existence of consciousness, but even a shallow explanation for the most immediate fact about our reality is better than none.