skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The hacker side of the sentence is not debatable.

He wrote a graphical toolkit, a sound synthesiser, an HTML parser, html template language, a language (grammar, parser, vm and jit, gc, ...), and many other software projects on his own.

All of these are a joy to use. They are not only well though out technically (and it's an euphemisim), their APIs are excellent and often fun to use, and they are wonderfully documented.

Do you know of many people who are proficient in so many domains?

He also has a very personal graphic and literary style. What makes him unique is that he treated coding as an artistic medium too, and that he was able to mix his various skills to create integrated works.

Can you name somebody else that would qualify for these traits?

If not he's indeed a remarkably unique artist/hacker, and a creative visionary since no one had done that before.
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Some projects don't have that possibility.
I know a few presidents of companies that routinely get on the phone with a competitor and try to chew them out over an issue such as poaching their employees. It's business trash talk. Every entrepreneur should have an open communication channel with their competitors. How are you supposed to beat them if you don't know them?
@PerfectBusiness blinkness.com: the anti-facebook lets college students get shit done. v1 up for my uni http://bit.ly/380vhJ #micropitch
It is my understanding that most professors who author textbooks do so for some combination of fame or altruism. Perhaps the author of a popular calculus book (Stewart) might earn enough to justify his time, but professors writing niche texts for upper-level courses likely earn minimum wage at best for their efforts.

Thirty years ago, one had to work with a publisher because the technologies required to create bound dead tree versions of your words were expensive and labor intensive. Now, the marginal effort (beyond actually writing the book) to make something look nice is fairly low. Wouldn't both fame and altruism be maximized by producing a free, widely-available text?

Edit: Compared to research, writing text books doesn't help much with obtaining tenure, does it?
Ask PG: Did my IP get banned from News.YCombinator.com ?
Hi. I'm not really sure if this is the proper way to address this but the contact email addresses from ycombinator.com seemed even worse choices.

My problem is that since two days ago I'm unable to read news.ycombinator.com from my home connection. First I confirmed that the page still works by accessing from a different ISP (from where I post this) then I got confirmation from another person on the same ISP as me that he can also access without problems. It's not my computer either seeing how none of the other 5 in my house gets a better result. I'm on a dynamic IP and currently I have 87.221.94.63 and all I get when I go to news.ycombinator.com is blank page. Firebird says that the http code is 200 OK but with 0 bytes content and Chrome says: "Error 320 (net::ERR_INVALID_RESPONSE): Unknown error."

At this point I think It's possible I might have some sort of ban on my IP (it's dynamic, but does'n change very often so it's possible I still have the same as two days ago). I started (or I've noticed) wright after I restarted a crashed Firefox session and it tried to reload several tabs with HN threads. Maybe that rapid fire request tricked some IDS or something. I also noticed that previous to this (by a few days) I lost my ability to down vote comments without, to my knowledge, having done anything offending. So meybe a similar "session with many HN threads reloaded quickly" caused that and then decided enough is enough?

Please help... the internets are tasteless without HN :_(
(<small_and_almost_hidden>on the flip side I seem to have worked more the last two days but screw that and give me back HN</small_and_almost_hidden>)
There's a problem with that, though. The context provided by the tree structure is lost. I intentionally worded this to be an example.
It's an interesting post (and more interesting discussion). I think this visualization http://bit.ly/p2T73 shows just how amazing Bolt is. I also can't believe someone can move faster than 10m a second. Just close your eyes and think about that. 1 second. More than 30 feet. Wow.
looks like it caught your comment both before and after you edited it
"You rely on the "obscurity" of your password."

Not really. Your password may be obscure (although it should probably be as random as you can get), but the key exchange protocols and encryption algorithms should be wide open. There's a reason why secret keys are called "secret" -- they should be the only thing you have to keep secret. If his hosting provider and wireless company can't keep his accounts secure, that's their problem, not his.
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Yeah really. I have a few thousand "consumer devices" running both Linux and actual UNIX.
I was disappointed by the backlash against Squashed on this site. Partly it's because he writes a personal blog, doesn't go out of his way to promote himself, and so probably wasn't writing for the Hacker News crowd; partly because as a former Tumblr user, he was one of the bloggers in the "in" crowd that wasn't snooty or irritating, and he spent a lot of time crafting his ideas to display online.

Also, the phrase "Lodwickian UberMensch" is worth a hundred upvotes. I'm a fan of Jake Lodwick's work, met him once in NYC at a concert, but his attitude towards other people is at least somewhat off-putting.
I guess a person sounding as if he knows what he is talking about is a good indicator that he actually knows what he is talking about.
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Hah, twitter is difficult.

Twitter: system for people to broadcast tidbits of information. Listener opts in. Sender does not expect reply. (111 chars)

This was my best attempt, because it raises enough questions to see that yes, twitter is different. It doesn't make an attempt to prove it's a good idea, just that it hasn't been done before (and is therefore worthy of investment).
Sunken cost is an interesting argument (though "fallacy" is an apt description), but I believe it does not address the design mistake made here. Given the composition of the first UI object (user / pass / submit / register) an user would click "register" thinking that the process is complete, only to gaze in horror as more fields are revealed.

If those fields are required from the start (which they really shouldn't be) they should be visible. The 'verbage' is all wrong.
Do you mean zero-sum games? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum

Although, the zero-game also exists (I had no idea): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_game
Please remember the incredible amount of pressure he felt to continue support for older projects. That is why he initially set timelimits on certain projects. If he had stopped committing, people would have been beating down his door for an explanation.
why have a image like this? http://s.wtimg.com/site_media/images/payment_options.png

at 128k its heavier than some whole web pages. (any ideas?)
Valve practices like... anti-agile. They take something and they say, "No, it's not PERFECT, let's start over."

And they're heroes.
I thought you needed to have 250 karma in order to down-vote things. There _might_ have been a change in the threshold, as you don't appear to have been given a lot of negative karma all of a sudden.
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A few of his arguements rest on the idea that "techno libertarians" all got rich from the tech bubble, but I know plenty of them getting rich right now sans bubble. Indeed, one of my most succesful friends got a job right out of college, and the offer came in august of 2008.

The author points out that many people do not have the luxury of enjoying computers. Well there are plenty of other careers that are high paying and intellectually stimulating (sales, actuary, contracting all come to mind). All of them require several years of practice and hard work before they result in a middle class income however.
Microsoft Bob is quickly becoming a pseudo Godwin's law for tech bloggers. There hasn't been anything new written about it in years. The only sort of interesting points were written in the article codinghorror quotes. (http://www.techflash.com/microsoft/Innovation_The_lessons_of...)
That was actually the original name of the article when I submitted it. Looks like it has now been changed to "This Kilogram Has A Weight-Loss Problem."
The editing clock has expired on my post above. I appreciate your point which was why I abstracted things into general terms - I still feel the qualitative difference is there, not because of specific history or PC-ness.

It's like if I was mad for some reason (eg my zero karma above) and responded by flaming you vs. simply not answering.
> Overall, the situation isn’t great. Flash works well under 32bit Linux but only when using closed source, bug ridden proprietary software.

There is a funny little contradiction: If Flash works well, how can you accuse the software to be "bug ridden"?
(Disclaimer: I don't like Flash, for political reasons).
Ask HN: Who is looking for a co-founder?
(I'm reposting this as I guess the initial timing of posting did not give any results. Here is the old post - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=774508)

Hi HN,

This is similar to "Who is hiring" post. I'm personally actively looking for co-founders, so thought it will be useful to start this discussion, and see if we can meet our next co-founders via HN.

Please submit your details if you're looking for a co-founder. (My details are posted in comment below.)
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I'll start with my own background and requirements -

I'm currently working on a social shopping startup - Shopialize. Shopialize is a Founder Institute (http://founderinstitute.com) incubated company. Currently I'm the only founder and developer at Shopialize. I'm actively developing the product and hoping to launch beta by October.

I'm seeking a bay-area based talented and passionate backend developer to join me as a Co-Founder to build this innovative and valuable product which will help consumers to discover great products and save money when they buy products.

Responsibilities: As a technical Co-Founder, you'll be primarily responsible for scalable software architecture and backend technology. You need to have experience in data-mining, information retrieval, and search engine technologies. It'll be great if you have experience in semantic web and machine learning as well.

I'm proficient in PHP and MySQL technologies, but if you convince me that we need to use other technologies, then I'm open to listen and change if it makes sense.

Compensation: It will be generous co-founder equity. If you want cash as well, then we can discuss cash+equity model as well. But Shopialize is currently in a pre-financing stage, so cash will be reasonable. To start with, you can start working with me in the part-time with minimum time commitment of 20 hours per week. When the company secures financing, you can expect a salary that will rise over time as revenue grows. It will then require a full-time commitment.

Contact: If you are interested, then please write to me aditya.kothadiya at gmail.com. You can send me your resume, or link of exciting projects you've done. We can meetup locally and then discuss the details in person.

To learn more about me, my recent project was http://tweeght.com and my blog is http://adityakothadiya.com
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You hit it right on. Part-time jobs, full-time in the summer and over winter break, big state school for Math and CS. You're also absolutely right that the 50 year old had an easier time of it, but the rising cost of schooling is a whole 'nother beast.
Examples?

(I've run many projects and have always been able to get some consumer feedback during development.)
Yeah, I doubt it. Honestly, look what happened to RealDVD. Granted, Apple has way more clout than Real, but the only way I can see this happening is if they made some sort of evil back-room deal with the MPAA which tied ripping to some DRM scheme that only allowed the ripped DVD to play on your authorized iTunes account. In that case, I'll pass. DVDFab + Handbrake works fine for me, thank you very much.
Pixar's the same way. They halted production of Toy Story for the better part of a year (if I recall the time correctly) so that the writers could improve the story.

Valve is terrific. I'll love them forever not for Half-Life, which is great but flawed, but for Steam, which lets me buy games quickly and has incredible weekend deals. (Two weeks ago they sold 10 brilliant indie games for $30. Best game-related deal since the Orange Box, which incidentally was also Valve.)
There are four levels of health: how healthy you are, how much health care coverage you get, how much health care coverage insurance you have, and what percentage of the population has insurance.

We've been arguing that increasing the percentage of those with a certain level of health care coverage insurance would be good for aggregate health.

My intuition is that removing corn subsidies would have a greater effect - and the aggregate health of the world would drastically increase if you consider the African sugar farmer who can't sell to western markets because of regulations and subsidies. Ohh, and it would make money, not cost money.
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This is indeed interesting and amusing. Thanks.
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what we need more of is self-hosted url shorteners!
I partially agree. You can't pitch a web hosting company this way, because they're commodities, and every web hosting company is essentially the same.

Luckily, investors like Richard Branson want ideas to be _new_ in order to be worthy of investment. And if you want to do something new, then you should be able to explain what's new in a few words. 111 characters is an arbitrary limit, but it's not terrible.

Amazon is new because it cuts out the middle man, and promises better margins for publisher and customer alike. That sounds like a good idea right away. Also, not everybody lives close to a Barnes & Noble, so the idea of delivery of books is by itself cool.

With an elevator pitch you only have a few seconds anyway. So you simply HAVE to convey as much as possible in as little time as possible. When you restrict yourself to a number of characters you can try to fit as much as possible in there. A much better metric than "3 sentences" or "10 seconds", because those two metrics can be gamed (sub sentences and talking rapidly).

111 characters is a gimmick, sure. But it's a _cool_ gimmick.
Ouch thanks, that image isn't even used in this version of the site, its from an old build, which is why it is still a high res version. Have removed it from the next CSS revision to go out. Will have a check around for anymore excess images, Thanks.

Mat
"We set up a small group of people to take every silly idea, every cool trick, everything interesting that existed in any kind of working state somewhere in the game and put them into a single prototype level. When the level started to get fun, they added more variations of the fun things. If an idea wasn’t fun, they cut it. When they needed a software feature, they simplified it until it was something that could be written in a few days. They all worked together on this one small level for a month while the rest of us basically did nothing. When they were done, we all played it. It was great."

Nice illustration of Gail's Law, from a comment [1] on HN today:

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%27s_law

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775134
I'm pretty sure Flickr isn't obligated to host images they don't want to. Given that, they need some placeholder text to put up in place of the image, so whatever moderator took it down probably clicked the copyright button (as opposed to the porn button).

If you want your day in court to prove your images are a fair use, host them on your own server. Why would you expect Flickr to pay to defend you?
'There are a few other questions raised, some of which I agree with(”Sadly, it[the admin app] struggles a little bit with nullable fields and is tricky to customize.”), and some which I dont, (”I will never write CSS by hand again.” - You shouldn’t be, someone else on your team should be doing that.)'

Ugh, this is just a totally unrealistic and out-of-touch argument. Look, I work on a website, and it's me and one other guy, and we both have to write frontend and backend code. It's not even remotely reasonable for us to just stop writing frontend stuff and tell our boss to hire someone else to do it. I fully understand why the Django templating language is the way it is, and it even makes sense, but it's not perfect for all situations, one of which is when the user is a big boy and can handle the responsibility of using full-blown python in a template.
That's a great article. I see some of the techniques that made free software so successful; like only allowing people to suggest ideas if it's something they could reasonably implement. ("Patches welcome")
From that article:

Avoid all one-shot technical elements. Anything that requires engineering work must be used in more than one spot in the game. Engineers are really slow. It takes them months to get anything done. If what they do is only used once, it’s a waste of a limited resource.

I'm not sure I 100% agree with this but it is something to keep in mind for many of us: if we're programming it, it should scale. Not scale to a hundred thousand users, that is easy. No, it should scale hilariously disproportionately to time invested.

Getting a new landing page on my site took me about an hour of programmer time. That is... well, OK, it performed well so it wasn't a waste of time, but it is something that I don't want to have to repeat for every landing page.

A little bit of Rails magic, though, and that one landing page became seven hundred. And additional ones can be created by my freelancers, whose time is very, very cheap relative to mine.
It has already come out. It is called the Olympus EP-1.
That's why you get an unlocked phone and buy an international SIM chip that you swap in overseas. $20K/year is ridiculous, and probably an exaggeration or lie on his part to try to make himself look like a desirable customer.
Pussy.
Maybe I'm crazy but this seems like an argument for communism. Basically he's saying success is due to luck and that the playing field will never be equal when some people can be lucky and others can't. Take this quote…

"This can lead to some awkward philosophical conclusions. If you have succeeded by doing something relatively simple, you have to ask yourself why everybody else hasn't done the same thing. You could tell yourself that they simply value different things and thus chose their lives. You sacrificed and worked hard-and even if somebody else looks like they've worked hard without the same results, they must be secretly lazy."

He's basically putting forth two premises: (a) 2 people can work equally hard and get vastly different results and (b) that there's something inherently wrong with that. But if both those are true than there's really only one solution which is communism. That's the very definition of communism in fact. Government is the only entity that has enough power over people to make things fair so it should control all the resources because it will act fairly and distribute rewards evenly.

I don't mean to accuse him of holding a belief he doesn't hold but how else could the world create the environment he desires?
"Release early, release often," would, for instance, likely be a poor philosophy for a team working on the computer vision systems used by armed autonomous military vehicles.
Games.

Complex games take a non-trivial amount of work to get them to where they're even remotely playable.
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I suspect the reason that technology and libertarianism go hand and hand are very different from those presented here. People who are technological are generally more engaged by machines than people, and have less of an appreciation of social norms. They also are more likely to appreciate the Austrian school of economics which is very mathematical in nature, and be less susceptible to emotional appeals in favor of certain policies (i.e. "oh how the poor kittens are starving, let's spend 1 billion on animal shelters this year").
I'll add it as an option
using a CDN
first up _why was active in more than the RoR community (look at potion, shoes, unholy, etc). Secondly, the majority of comments have been directed towards the dramatic way in which he left and the fact he will be sorely missed.
* Communism isn't inherently bad.

* There's a wide swatch of gray between the market and the government, and it's acceptable that society should fall between the two.
The admin not allowing email addresses as usernames still irks me, such a seemingly pointless restriction in this day and age.

Decent response to the original article, though I have to admit that I have a pet peeve about developers declaring libraries/frameworks "insufficient", "lacking" or "fundamentally flawed" as an excuse to write things themselves. Or maybe I'm just grumpy.
The implication that designers are not "big boys" is offensive. I will parry with: "big boys" often wield power they don't understand to theirs and everyone else's detriment. More importantly, if all the big boys get hit by a machismo bus who will be around to cook the spaghetti?
Very well said. I could be saying any of these statements and if these were things that were non-existent, it would not be as appealing.
I would like to find out if Branson would fund me for the following:

"Provide health care to everyone, employer subsidized, co-ops, non-profit".

"solar powered clean drinking water for rural areas".

I might as well say "Space time continuum, user generated, freemium"
I didn't say communism was inherently bad. Admittedly I think it is. But I went out of my way not to make a value judgment so as to not cloud the point I was trying to make which is that the stated philosophy is communism. My intent was just to state the facts as I saw them and let others judge.

As for your other point there certainly is a wide swath between the two but if you want complete fairness than you have to go all the way to the Government side.
"Nor do they have any monopoly on a distorted view of reality." Libertarians' views of reality are almost always less distorted than the downright wacko views held by most Democrats and Republicans, socialists and conservatives.

Nor are all, or even most, libertarians particularly successful, much less the money worshipping conservatives the socialistic "social responsibility" whiners like this essay like to criticize.
No; the problem must be something else.
Heh. I used to have that bit set. No biggie though. I wasn't using it that much I was just curious and mentioned it as potentially useful for someone wanting to restore my access. Having to access HN through VNC over SSH over lame ADSL is what cramps my style these days.
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Apparently, giving a public speech didn't reveal his identify, so why shouldn't he "do things like that"?