skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, but for a different reason.

I prefer to work on things that no one else is working on. Either because they don't know about it, they don't think it can be done, or they don't know how to do it.

Every time I catch myself doing sys admin work, I think, "There's probably a million other people who could do this, why am I?"

OTOH, analyzing a business problem, then designing, developing, and implementing a software solution that no one else ever has, now that's the kind of stuff this geek must do before he dies.
You don't need permission. You don't have to ask anybody.

Unless there is a fear that VC/angel funding will be denied because the founder is a woman...

Not sure if this is true, just a possibility.
Huge bags of cash certainly wouldn't hurt...
Output Redirection With Bash
I live in San Francisco ("the City"), and I'm a huge fan of the place. And the previous posts are right about there be more social life, by far, in SF. But given your situation, I would think carefully about Mountain View. There's so much talent down in the valley. The city tends to be younger and more design-centric. And Mountain View or one of the towns near it is certainly far cheaper.

Also, it depends a lot on you what your start up ideas involve. I would look at the Peninsula like an OSI 7-layer stack. San Jose and the South Bay are the lower layers, and then as you move north, you work your way into the higher layers. There is a definite clustering of expertise anchored by a a few big companies in each area. Core networking and silicon bending are done in San Jose by Intel, AMAT, Nat Semi., Layer 2-3 are down close by with Cisco. Mtn. View, Palo Alto, and San have some great middleware and web software - Google, Yahoo, Oracle. Then SF is a lot of UI and Application layer work. To be fair, the city is attracting a whole new wave of start-ups. And my OSI model has all kinds of glitches (like Apple being so far south). but I still think its a good guide line. If you're doing something similar to what Google does, it might make sense to be physically close to them.
And I'll say it again, the South Bay is much cheaper.
Mysterious ruins may help explain Mayan collapse
I think he chose it specifically because of the pleasing self-similarity -- it's sort of a joke. After all, what kind of problem is a mutable date? A time problem, of course.
The Future of Screencasting
I used to be one of these folks. "Hey now, I have a great idea! But dang, I can't program. Let me find a co-founder that does." Needless to say, none of my ideas got anywhere. You need to be able to sell your idea, and I think the best way to sell to a more technical person than you is to actually build a prototype yourself.

I don't have a CS degree, but spending some time working in a software company teaches so much about software development. Roadmaps, iterations, hotfixes, and source control, to name a few. Necessary things I never would have thought about working on my next great idea for a website. All of this for non-technical customers who could care less about web services and frameworks. It was a very interesting dynamic explaining that a bug that was affecting them couldn't be fixed NOW and had to wait for the next site release. I now have a deeper understanding of how software development works in application. Not to mention the interesting dynamic of customer communication.

Moral of my story is that if you are not technically minded, spend some time doing some work that is somewhat related to software development. Bug reporting, tech support, etc. It doesn't matter what the job is, just ask a lot of questions in engineering and think about what's going on around you. Not to mention work on your own code after work.
I thought goople app engine didnt allow outgoing connections

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/tools/devserver...

Using URL Fetch

When your application uses the URL fetch API to make an HTTP request, the development web server makes the request directly from your computer. The behavior may differ from when your application runs on App Engine if you use a proxy server for accessing websites.
Meh.

1. Build a telescope by grinding your own mirror and use it to see Saturn's rings and Jupiter's moons.

2. Make a chain mail shirt

3. Build a Stirling engine and/or steam engine.
> Hydrocarbons aren't the only source of energy into the future.

Okay, so name a production-ready source of energy or combination of sources that broadly matches oil's density, portability, fungibility and diversity of uses.

We don't have decades to come up with something else: oil is already at its maximum production rate. As soon as this recession ends and demand for oil starts growing, we'll see triple-digit price spikes again and more economic volatility.

Your blithe mantra about "technology" ignores the crucial fact that the technology that powers our society runs on massive and ever-growing inputs of energy. Our one-time allotment of cheap, abundant energy is already more than half-consumed, and the awkward fact is that we're absolutely not ready to transition our economy over to something else.
I wonder if there is an entirely different way to reason about computation, other than mutable state, which coincides with our intuitions based on everyday experience of the physical world; and immutable state, which coincides with the powerful and abstract approach of our mathematics.

Alas, mutable and immutable would appear to cover all the cases.
"Mixed numbers and letters over 8 characters long. Memorize it once, use it forever."

Wait, is this sarcasm?
Many people don't even know what a search engine is. They will just type the search term into the location bar. Then the browser's default search engine does the rest. For internet explorer, that would be Bing, I suppose. Since apparently IE still has the majority of the browser market (another data point that is hard to believe), that alone should account for a lot of usage.
Microkernels are not superior from a technical perspective, but from a software engineering perspective.

-Monolithic kernels do not enforce modular implementations, inevitably leading to unnecessary dependencies

-Monolithic kernels need to be developed by a single party, who could not possibly manage such a large code base. The result is poorly maintained code.

-Monolithic kernels need to be recompiled to turn off features (and I have better things to do)

-Microkernels can tolerate more bugs (may be good or bad)

-probably a couple more
My favourite password: passphrase. Something like "some easy to remember phrase. With some punctuation and 1 or 2 numbers!"
Either this, or derivative: "setrp.Wspa1||2n!".
Why Health Care Will Never Be Equal
As someone who resides not in United States, Puerto Rico, Canada, China or England, I must say that Geek Squad seems sort of an unnecessary and forced invention. It's no surprise that their prices are so high as they have various costly conventions and vehicles, "Geekmobile" being an example.
While many SEO proponents don't know their stuff, I think Google's statement of "just produce good content, we do the rest" is even more bullshit. If you ever had a great site on page 14 while some spammy crap is on page 1 for the same keywords, you know what I am talking about. Google is NOT perfect, and some sites do SEO successfully.
Good advice. Transaction costs and, in particular, startup costs are some of the most difficult things I face in my (graduate student) day-to-day. Simply getting up to the whiteboard can be difficult.

I'm definitely going to start using a reference managing website.

I've been using Ad Block Plus to keep myself out of Reddit and Google Reader at work. (Sadly, I think the time has come to add HN, as well.) The method works, and I've been tempted only once or twice to circumvent the blocks.
I'm sure he's a really smart guy, but he sounds like a Computer Science freshman who is just beginning to grasp the problems of concurrency and consistency (could be his way of explaining). We already know these things are hard. No reason to give it a new, vague name like "Time management".
I want to be part of the next contest of this kind. Does anyone know of one that is currently running?
How Google Street View Works – In Stop Motion
8 rules users should insist on for quality iPhone apps
Telecom Company is too vague a term. For example, I work for a company which sells value added SMS services to mobile operators (eg, our anti spam/fraud product is popular right now). This is a telecom company, as are our customers. What you didn't specify is do you want to start a carrier/operator/ISP or a service company or a hardware manufacturer or...

What it takes really depends on what it is you want to do. In general, though, I think it takes skill/expertise most of all (not that you need it to begin with, but you will need to learn and its tough to pick up because theres so many densely packed RFCs, standards and regulations. For what I do, I'd say I sifted through 10K pages of GSM specs and RFCs..), money is no more important than any other startup, though obviously if you do something that requires resources (hardware?) then you need to be able to pay for this. Selling to operators also seems to be the same as selling expensive enterprise software: looong lead times, development and work to be done before the deal is closed, money after everythings installed and working etc (so you need to have enough funds on hand to be able to get this far). Finally, its tough to break into the telco industry because most companies dont like to take risks and a startup with an unproven product poses risk over the old big well established company.
5 Ways to Boycott the Economy
There is a tendency within our society to treat our economic systems as a natural progression of socio-economic development, and though many criticise such flawed assertions, the vast majority of us rarely question the economic structures by which we live.
The correct answer is: always put seat and lid down, as this prevents the bathroom from being filled with a fine mist of your urine/faeces when you flush.
Depends on the project. If it's just for a simple content site, I'll use my hosting account through ASmallOrange. If I need Ruby/Python/more resources than a shared account I'll set the client up on GAE or Slicehost.
In my previous job they usually advised us to use an acronym/initialism derived from some phrase which would be memorable to us. I dunno how secure it was. For one thing I'd bet 90% of the people had the substring "wtf" in there somewhere. Or "Ihmfj" (I hate my f*ing job). Plus a few numbers.
> Don't tell others what to do

Why not? Everybody does it, including you in the above sentence :)

> Using your logic we've had to tell people to shut up about Apple, Google and Microsoft as well

No, that's not the logic of my post. And yes, I would prefer if fewer articles were about established businesses or about business that haven't found a business model and there's none in sight ... and more about new ways of thinking, new algorithms, new technological breakthroughs and new business models (that are actually working).

Maybe Twitter is alluring because it is a simple, yet very popular service. But you're not going to implement the next Twitter and all the low-hanging fruits have already been taken.
I certainly see the resemblance, but I don't think that webpage keywords and tagging systems are exactly the same.

One major difference is the identity of the tagger. The creator of the page is generally the one adding the keywords, so there is an inherent bias that is different from the perspective of users who add tags (though they're biased in their own ways).

Ideally the perspective of the tagging users align with the perspective of users who are using the tags to access content, and so the users following the tags end up reaching content thats most appropriate.
A computer science freshman? I'd rather argue the opposite -- that he's one of the few guys in Computer Science who comes up with something original AND builds a language that supports his ideas to see if they work in practice.

Even if you don't think Hickley is on the right track, how can you not like his combination of hands on implementation and search for theoretical soundness?
Nice, but I'd rather see DevPay coming to Europe!
So, we're both saying that publishers' pricing is driven by the latter of "the maximum the buyer is willing to pay....& the minimum the seller is willing to sell at..."

But we disagree as to why. You say the marketplace is too competitive or monopolistic. I'd say it is because publishers are B2B (business to business) and not B2C (business to consumer).

I am not referring to just existing publishers, so suction cups for the dead is not entirely accurate. The competitive opportunity for new entrants as well as to turnaround existing publishers is (now positively rephrased): Be a B2C business, market directly to consumers, immerse yourself in what your consumers think your product is worth and what they will pay for it.

For media, an investment in a B2C model starts to generate revenues sooner than the B2B model. Because, in the media B2B model, the audience has to be built before making dollar one from advertisers, distributors, merchandise licensees, etc. Therefore B2B is the more "wishful thinking" model of the two.
For what you want a java tutorial is the simplest thing. Then all you have to do is translate the syntax, eg System.currentTimeMillis() becomes (System/currentTimeMillis). And of course the briefest tutorial of lisp/clojure, just enough to learn to define a function.

Why? First because both GUI and serial manipulations are java things, not clojure. You'd have to learn the java parts anyways.

Then why stick to clojure? Actually, there is a great benefit to this: the REPL. For what you want, it will be much easier to just type things in the console and see if they work. I'd go as far as to say you should learn clojure syntax first, and then go through the java tutorials tying the examples in clojure. For both GUI and serial comm it'll be easier to learn this way.

edit: Holloway's is an excellent book, but I think in this case it's a bit of an overkill. It's worth buying anyways, just to have it for reference.
Having something to lose can make you more risk averse.
Time to Taste the Android Donut
Not especially, no.

The issue wasn't that the picture in the middle didn't move. It was that the picture in the middle was the only thing on the page I could see myself possibly caring about. Nothing else on the page helps me make a decision between competitors.

I would look at companies like Fog Creek and 37 Signals to get an idea of what a profile should look like. Here's the thing. I don't know anything about your experience, but I bet you recognize both of those names, and I bet you recognize both of them because of their popular blogs. In fact, I can't even tell you what 37 Signals does, but I know about them anyway. I have no first hand experience with anyone at Fog Creek, but I feel like it would be an awesome company to work with.

Profiles need to have something personal. You aren't going to hook people with an address and a promise to offer "strategic solutions" (a phrases that as far as I can tell means nothing to anyone). I don't care who your business contacts are. I don't care what your "third industry" is. I definitely need more than one big ad to get me to choose you. I think if you take just 5 minutes to look through 37 Signals home page, you will see how it is at least 100 times better than what any profile on there could be.

Above the fold of 37 Signals home page, I learn that they develop web apps, that they offer 4 main products, and what those products do. If I scroll down a page, I hear their pitch of their best strengths, see that I have access to video customer testimonials (awesome!) and learn that they have two regularly updated blogs (awesome, that means they didn't just throw up a website and leave it there hoping something would come from it). I also learn that they have a book and some more smaller apps. At the bottom of the page, I learn some cool stuff not directly related to their business. They developed Ruby on Rails, they have an affiliate program, etc. I also see that people care about their business and are talking about it.

If I compare a Prospect Vista profile... I see an update at the top, pushing down the main content of the page to give me information I don't care about. I see a quick profile with nothing that I care about in it. I see a list of contacts that I don't care about. In the middle, I see a big banner ad that I may or may not care about depending on how talented the person who made it was. I see comments and a discussion board, both of which are likely to be quiet and therefore not worth caring about. Finally, I see a huge amount of contact information which I have no reason to care about because nothing has hooked me.

I don't mean to be harsh. I think I can sum up everything by saying that your profiles are too much like MySpace pages and not enough like compelling business websites.
Agreed. MikeCapone, I'd also recommend that you start with the essay at the very end of the book; serves as a good intro/overview.
Win the fight, lose the customer
The Itunes argument is innacurate (I think pg gets it wrong too when he makes a slightly different point in his publishing essay http://www.paulgraham.com/publishing.html).

The key to Itunes is not technically speaking a monopoly: it is convenience. You can obtain digital media from any other source and import it into Itunes.

Where Apple hold the monopoly is in the path to the Ipod (aka Itunes). Using THAT monopoly they can provide a convenient way to get your music within Itunes - at a low enough cost (a point pg made) for it often to be worth it.

Apple's convenience in Itunes arises out of their monopoly; but there is no reason it cant come about in another way in the publishing field. If we sit and look at what is really inconvenient for consumers of online publishing and try to solve that we might have another way to monetize it.

(I realise feed readers is potentially a solution to one of the biggest inconveniences)
Export Hacker News Thread to an Excel
The Strategic Fumble
The fumble is usually caused by competitors but is often easier to recover from.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/t...
Lake Urmia Photo Gallery
Such an awful problem to have. I feel horrible for the employees there. =)
My Programmer "Must do before you Die List"

1) Implement lisp within itself. Implement lisp in ruby.

2) Write your own Webserver.

3) Truly understand Haskell and Monads

4) Write a useful genetic algorithm.

5) Build a working neural net.

6) Finish SICP.

7) Work through and finish On Lisp.

8) Build a highly concurrent server application with erlang.
I just started reading Norvig's PAIP, and one of the things that surprised me was seeing lisp code written in a non-functional manner. Of course the code in PAIP evolves and the early iterations are "bad" on purpose, but it's amazing how obviously wrong some early patterns seemed just because I was used to Clojure's more functional style.
Pair programming seems like one of those necessary evils. I don't find working with a partner any fun in terms of the joy of hacking stuff out and figuring stuff out on your own, but I see the value in having multiple eyes on code, and I'm sure it could have found lots of bugs in my past.
Are sales people different from you and me?
We created this utility because many startups ask HN community to review their startups and they get lot of excellent responses. I also did the same but after that managing the replied were little pain as I had to manually create an excel sheet for that. Now this will help people like me to get all the replies properly in an excel file which can be manipulated as and when needed. Let me know what HN thinks of this.
I had fairly bad experiences with pair programming. None of the physical reasons the author brought up applied: it was in a decent, private room, with decent hardware. The social problems did not apply: it was with cool, friendly people.

It turns out that, in pair programming, while the active person hacks with all his neurons firing, the passive one sits bored out of his mind. I found that passively following someone else's programming, and possibly even fixing minor mistakes, barely uses up a fraction of the mental energy of actively coding. The passive ends up being a distraction. When the passive makes a comment ("have you considered changing this function to do XYZ?"), the active looks up, completely distracted and torn from his concentration, and stares at the passive. "What?.. What did you say?.. Oh... yes, that function... I already thought of that, and here's why it can't work." Basically, I found that being passive in a programming pair also blocks the kind of forward-thinking analysis which leads to good programs.

One more thing. The author claims that pair programming helps avoid duct-taping problems. I completely disagree, at least when it comes to my own work. When I look at my code, and I see the beginnings of something bad, I ask myself: "Could someone else understand this in two months? Will I, when it breaks?" Then I go back and fix it. Whereas in pair programming, two people will likely look at each other and say, "Oh yeah, that's an obvious workaround! Let's keep going!"
I don't believe it was his original schooling that is the problem, I believe it is his recent further studies at the ExxonMobil academy.
I'm betting [bossname]sucks was a popular one.
Chrome tips and tricks for better browsing
Y SIN EMBARGO magazine #21, ink or link? *PUBLISHED
Perhaps programming isn't really for the masses, many of these points just describe traits in people that cause bad software to be written period.

The best teams are those who are passionate about getting software right: they'll do whatever is needed to make their software work well. Whether that is pair programming or not. Whether to pair depends on how work is organized, it really requires episodes http://c2.com/ppr/episodes.html (or usually called stories). Pairing is, for me at least, one tool in the toolbox. It is particularly good on green-field projects I've found where there are a lot of decisions to be made.
I thought they were "Love", "Sex", "Secret", and "God"?
In what way are the commercial carriers "unaccountable"? I can always vote with my pocketbook, as the saying goes. But when it's the FCC ensuring that one-size-fits-all, I can't do that.

And in the past, when the FCC has issued regulations or fines that you disagree with, how have you made them account for their actions? What, exactly, is the process for a citizen to exert influence over specific regulatory policy? Granted that, as a parent post argued, you can exert some influence in general by way of your legislators, but how can you ever say "that was the straw that broke the camel's back, I want out."?

In the case of the commercial carriers, though, restricted speech may in some specific situations be a good thing. While I disagree with it myself, should people with specific sets of values be allowed to purchase a net connection that's pre-filtered for ideas the find offensive (say, hate speech, or gay content)? That's their right, isn't it?

Today in the television arena, we argue because what's broadcast goes out to everyone, and some people don't want some shows to be seen. With broadcast, they don't have the option of blocking it from their own home, so the get the FCC to block it from everyone's home. If ISPs are allowed to filter, then those ISPs can do the filtering for those with "delicate sensibilities" can have the bland world they want, and the rest of us can revel in free speech unhindered.
Wow, that's one arrogant piece of writing. That still doesn't provide any good, scientific reason why pair programming is that much better -- yay for anecdotes.

But I guess I'm just one of those anti-social programmers. Excuse me while I try to see which of my unwashed heavy metal shirts to wear today.
Love these fish (JS UI fun)