skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Help me make the leap
I'm 23 years old, no family. My living expenses including student debt is about 3k/month. I feel ready and competent to begin a startup, but I really don't have any idea how to transition from my salaried job, given bills, relocation, risk of failure and making sure I have a source of income in 6 months.

If I wanted to get seed funding for early 2010, what steps should I be takking right now? I'm on the verge of committing to a few months of weekend prototyping but really want to feel like I Have direction before I stat sinking that kind of time. Can you direct me towards posts from people in my situation who made the leap?
The datestamp at the bottom reads: "Last modified: Tuesday, 14 November 2006"
I'd like to see an iphone favicon, so that when one "Add To Home Screen"s a link to HN they would get a nice icon in the app list rather than an unrecognizable screen shot. A quick

convert -resize 57x57 favicon.ico apple-touch-icon.png

would be blurry but would suffice. Of course, scaling down your original would be much better.
It's a reasonably high performance system (for what it does) with a dynamic language that is thoroughly integrated.
Nonetheless, under current (US?) copyright code, reformatting documents by stripping out 'extraneous' advertising and saving them in a different format for later use is flat-out illegal.

Really? Would you mind pointing out where in the US Code or the DMCA (or whatever else you're referring to) that says this? I'm not as knowledgeable on copyright as I'd like to be; need to start learning more somewhere, and this seems like a good place.
http://www.touregypt.net/food.htm
...Pork is considered unclean by Muslims, but is readily available, as is beef...

This was, of course, before the recent cull...
People who are outsourcing to Vietnam or the US?
My living expenses including student debt is about 3k/month

Whether or not you're going the startup route, you want to keep your expenses as low as possible (ditch the car if you're making payments, crash with friends/relatives, learn to love ramen, etc). $3k/month seems high for a 23 year old with no family, unless you're already in Silicon Valley.
The ideas don't sound very difficult to swallow.

Ted Nelson talked about being trapped by the programmers retarded ideas for systems back in the 70s/80s. He said that the system designers didn't give enough thought to the user interface and instead forced users to comply with some rigid inconvenient standard all the while saying, "This is how the computer wants your data entered".

Also...Steve Jobs is a pleb when it comes to good design.
They've been trying to brand it that way lately. I thought it was strange, too.
Yes. No contradictcion. I just bought from Amazon (in Germany) a week ago.

My comment was purely about retail and Wal-Mart.
I don't feel like money is the issue though. When you're working for a company your job is to produce something for them--something that moves the company forward. In grad school, your work is much more selfish. You have ample time to think about problems in ways that only you can solve.
I don't know how to do it. But if we know it's a problem, then perhaps people will think of ways to do it. Maybe you could bury the tree at the bottom of a mountain somewhere. We should be thinking of ways of perhaps compressing or sequestering organic material to prevent it from reentering the carbon cycle.
LOL.
The paper is very recent. And extremely impregnable for someone like me. I was actually hoping for some comments on it by people who work on RBMs. Like I got some good comments on a ML gallery I posted. Sometimes comments help clear up things, and even a little clearing up is good IMHO.

I think they did because they didn't have a look at the abstract, but read it partially by title only.
And maybe you know, thought it was something introductory on RBM's ?
I mean RBMs are extremely pretty. And I am just beginning to appreciate that.
> let the offers compete

http://images.google.com/images?q=Athens+garbage+strike
So you want a month by month cellular plan? I would be surprised if AT&T woudln't sell you one if you walk into the store and ask for it.
http://www.google.de/search?q=walmant+leaves+germany gives:

"Competitors, like the low-cost chains Aldi and Lidl, continue to grow and succeed in Germany. In fact, the competition from a surge of low-cost chains is attributed with keeping average food costs as much as 40% lower in Germany than in France or Great Britain." (http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/07/walmart_leaves.php)

And:

"Wal-Mart, which entered the German market eight years ago, struggled against the might of the discount retailers already operating in Germany, including the no-frills Aldi and Lidl." (http://www.intuitive.com/blog/walmart_sells_off_german_store...)

or: "Wal-Mart Stores Inc. boasts that its discount pricing attracts more than 127 million visits to its American stores each week. In Germany, however, its prices apparently weren't low enough." (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115407238850420246.html)

Wal-Mart is expensive compared with Aldi. And Aldi has a reputation for treating its employees well, bargaining hard but fair with its suppliers and delivering great value to customers. (My own opinion, but you can read something at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi#Reputation)

[Sorry, I am a fan.]
> At some point my browser will crash, and then will crash again before I’ve restored the previous session.

I use Camino so it's happened to me once or twice. I used the history listing to find them again (camino lists both the first and last visits to a given URL, a bunch of URL grouped together with identical last access and first access widely different both from one another and the corresponding last access points to the URLs loaded the last time I launched the browser e.g. after a restart)
There's this confusion that VCs exist primarily to help innovative startups get off the ground. This just isn't true; they really exist to generate returns for their investors. The complaint that entrepreneurs are so underserved by VCs misses the point: a VC only needs to make a couple investments a year to meet their goals for their LPs. VCs aren't, and have never been, the gatekeepers to success -- and that's not their intention.

Yes, there's a long tail of crappy VCs that don't make money and are generally wastes of space -- but that's more an argument for less venture capital in the valley, not more, at any price point, whether it's $200k or $2 million.
I can't think of a case where excessively powerful has not become excessively intrusive. Even if governments don't mean to interfere in the economy, they have to in order to protect their power, because money can be turned into political power.

You saw this particularly clearly with Putin. Anyone whose wealth was combined with any sort of political ambition got destroyed. He only had that problem because he inherited some rich and comparatively untamed people from the previous administration. You couldn't get rich in Russia today without already being a Putin loyalist. I suspect it is the same in China.
WebMynd (YC 08) launches RedesignGoogle Contest.
@zev i only want a month to month 3G/4G plan that connects to my compatible 3G/4G Internet mobile device (i.e. iPod Touch). That does not exist at the moment!

I don't want cell phone svc; i prefer using the Internet to communicate via text(primary) or voice(2ndary).
On the surface, this is a sobering reflection on our impermanence. But, I think this evokes the more beautiful idea that, in all likelihood, the world will not be without us.

Humans will be able to carry on through whatever epic tragedies we organize or in whatever nightmarish environments we concoct.

Our defining characteristic is adaptability. We are like massively clever cockroaches.

The world may be too much with us, but it'll have to make do.
The title and content of the post state that, if the UI is terrible, then it was (probably) created by a programmer. They do not say the converse, nor does the converse automatically follow (the converse being: if the UI was created by a programmer, then it is terrible).
It is not a VC idea, I agree. However, in order for the founde visa to work, you would need to get atleast some VC's on board, which is what the OP is arguing against, I believe.
As opposed to the irrational monkeys that dump their trash in the ocean? Or shoot satellites powered by plutonium into fast-decaying orbits? Or use ASATs to destroy satellites, then cry out for ways to get all that trash out of orbit? Or make TV sets full of heavy metals, then provide no way to dispose of them safely?

From my POV, there's plenty of irrational to go around. Finger-pointing is an exercise fraught with peril.
I see over and over naysayers of this visa claiming all kinds of fraud that can happen, and all kind of reasons why it is a bad idea, without really addressing on how to make it fair.

To the all naysayers of the visa, there are easier system's to game the system. Marriage. That's right. I have a friend that did it (with way less than 20k). Sure there are some steps to prevent fraud (even interviews), but that doesn't stop most people getting married just for citizenship, except the most obvious cases.

According to the 'nay-sayers' logic, we should stop giving green card/citizenship through marriage, b/c maybe 15% of them are fraud.

If you really really want to live in the US, and have about 50k, you will find somebody that will marry (my friend found it for a lot less money). No need to go through this Visa problem.

It is kinda wierd, but it is much easier for a less educated person to game the system, then for somebody that is more educated (most under the table jobs,are blue collar ones).

In any way, saying we shouldn't let the Founder Visa b/c there might be potential fraud, is pure FUD. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt, just for your own little short sighted self.

If you enjoy an america without immigrants, a go live in West Virginia, or Alabama.
Two other pieces of advice:

1) For the love of God, introductions are not about you--its about them. You'll get your chance to tell your story if you first make their needs a priority.

2) Always introduce yourself to the person sitting next to you on a plane. You might be surprised by what you learn from them over the course of a 3 hour flight.
Had to post this, not related to pangrams though. This is an amazing sentence.

I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications' incomprehensibleness

Guess what is unique about it? Nth word is N letters long.
Why? Does one wrong make another one go away?

If it's screwed up, say so. Sure everybody is screwed up, but only by talking about it are we able to improve.
It doesn't seem like anyone's problems are really being solved. I accomplish all of this with Hacker News, Delicious, Digg, and my own browser bookmarks. If I tried to become involved in every company whose products I use, I would not have time to create my own company/products.

I can appreciate your enthusiasm for community and the web, but I think your passion may be better served elsewhere.

edit Then again, maybe I'm just not your target user/owner.
The claim isn't that corruption is caused by govts, it's that govts make corruption inevitable.

Corruption requires a govt from which to extract special privs via illicit means. (Unless, of course, you're referring to moral corruption.)

It isn't corruption to dump sewage into the drinking water supply if there's no govt restriction on said dumping that you evade through "connections". (Yes, it's wrong to do so even if there's no rule against it, but corruption is the evasion, not the act itself.)

Of course, black markets often involve corruption because "black market" is, by definition, illegal, which requires a govt.

There is a form of corruption involving companies (such as bribing someone to get hired) but they don't affect other people.
Yeah, it really saddens me. As an Egyptian, I grew up watching old Egyptian movies my parents always had running on the tv, and still do. I would see the Nile in all it's glory, flanked on both edges by beautiful rows of palm trees, etc. I guess that's how it really was back then, according to the parents. But it's not like that anymore. I've gone back to the motherland about 3 times in the last decade and have always been thoroughly disappointed. It's dirty, underdeveloped, etc. You drive down one block and see rundown apartment buildings, and out of nowhere you see a marble crafted government building that has not one blemish or crack. However, being a Copt, I do find the monasteries to be one of the few preserved gems of Egypt, where you can see artwork from hundreds and hundreds of years ago still in its original form painted on huge rock walls. Other than that, and the handful of tourist spots (museums, libraries and whatever is left of the ancient ruins), I really can't suggest anywhere to visit in Egypt that'll give you that Indiana Jones, culturally rich 3rd world country feel to it. Even places like Alexandria, which are considered to be on the cleaner part of the spectrum, don't do much for me. There are places like Sharm El-Sheikh that are great, but consider them like the Cancun of the middle east - nothing really culturally original.

Overall, I don't enjoy visiting that country, but that's dependent on the specific places I choose to visit. For a place that was once a leader in philosophy and sciences, the inventor of papyrus, the builder of the pyramids, to have devolved into what it is today is really sad.
I strongly disagree with his "developers need to brag" section...in my experience, those developers that brag the most are those whose code is a negative contribution (pardon the oxymoron).

Also, if you're generating a bunch of good code and solving hard problems, people are going to notice you.
That is true, but there where (are?) quite some limitations on what kind of investments the banks could/can make if they want FDIC to insure the deposits.
One thing I like doing when pair programing is have the navigator code up the specs for the new feature while the driver is implementing... I find it rather efficient at catching bugs...
> For example, with my brothers and a few of their friends it is entirely expected that you will get stabbed in the back in a game if it helps the other guy win.

My fiancée will always put the dagger in my back in games. That's love, I guess.
It's a damn book, not a quick article.

Sad.
for arrington he needs to add #9 - "Don't spit on me"
Wow, so Dilbert is really about CIA conspiracy!
> you really want to have for example floating point to be behaving exactly like in target language

You keep writing that like it's a hard thing to do. It isn't. More to the point, it's a small part of the whole problem.
(12) General Devices for Lowering Morale and Creating Confusion

(e) Act stupid.

-clearly why we won the war
It would be nice if the thumbnail previews expanded when you click them. I don't use Firefox so I'm not going to install these, but I'd like to view them in more detail.
Skype Founders Suing More People
yes, and there's already a design with boobs!
do you really think handling a (non-technical) investor will be less work/less distraction than contracting part time? Sure, contracting takes time away from what you want to do, but it's pretty easy, and clients don't push you to do things that may not be in the interest of your customers.
And a healthy dose of selective memory and bias, let's not forget.

It's depressing that this is news. Also mews: my friend thinks people who drink Coors are gay and may not realize it yet. Why not, right? It's just as testable as this nonsense story is.
>The claim isn't that corruption is caused by govts, it's that govts make corruption inevitable.

They also enforce laws preventing it.

>There is a form of corruption involving companies (such as bribing someone to get hired) but they don't affect other people.

Of course they affect other people, what do you mean? There are all kinds of harmful corrupt practices not involving governments.
Hmm. No paper to be found on the web; no actual data in the article (apart from the totally bogus 'we checked 10 gay people and they were all marked as gay' analysis); no false negative or false positive data.

Absolutely no way to evaluate whether this has any value whatsoever.
Actually, what I owned was a Timex Sinclair 1000, which was a rebranded ZX-81. Apologies for the confusion. The rest of the Sinclair Spectrum line never made it to the states, as far as I know...so my knowledge is limited to what I read in magazines back then, and what I've read on the net since then.
Maybe "brag" is too strong of a word, but it all depends on what kind of company you work for. Keeping quiet pretty much ensures that only your peers and possibly your tech lead will know what quality and quantity of work you're churning out, unless they decide to share.

If you're working for a small company where the CEO sifts through source control to see what's changing, producing good code will certainly suffice, but if you work in a large company with a multi-tiered management structure, keeping quiet only pushes the responsibility to promote your work to someone else - and you can't always rely on that happening.
$3K/month seems high even in Silicon Valley - mine are about $1.5-2K/month, and I live without a roommate in a nice apartment only a couple blocks from downtown Mountain View. I think I could get them under $1k/month by getting roommates, moving to Sunnyvale or Santa Clara, eating more rice & beans, not having bought a new car, etc.
> Candidates have to pair with us onsite for at least a week before the team decides whether to hire. We've hired qualified interns, but don't hire apprentice or junior-level folks.

How do those people get the time to do the week with you? Do you only hire folks who are currently unemployed? (Full time for a week means that they're not interviewing elsewhere.) Do folks use vacation (or unpaid) time to see if you'll take them on?
I would have gone for fulldisclojure.com -- a little longer but seems to better represent the intent. Still, nice job.
Compilers are a big topic. Any "quick article" of substance will have references to underlying tools and concepts the author will expect you to know.

If you're completely lost, try starting with interpreters first. Compilers build on many of the same ideas, but interpreters are generally simpler. Read "The Art of the Interpreter" and/or SICP, and do the exercises. The former is a short paper, the latter is an excellent book expanding on it.
Opinions on declining an offer after accepting it?
I feel more comfortable posting my situation here than on Reddit. I'm a Master's student graduating in April '10. I have already applied to a couple of 2010 full-time/rotational development and internship (some companies accept students who have already graduated for internships) positions. I have also accumulated a year of internship experience during my Master's program at two Fortune 500s + graduate research work - so my prospects are brighter (not that I'm boasting about it). I'm not really a hacker, I just need a corporate job (I'm on F-1 student visa (I also did my Bachelor's in the US) and the new OPT rules state that I'll have to get a job within 3 months of my graduation - or - go for PhD in Fall - but I'm not really a PhD type of person - although I like doing research)..

My concern is -

1) If I get an offer from company A in October and I accept it (fear of not getting further offers) and suddenly get another offer the next week from company B (say with better salary, work-life balance, role closer to my interests etc.), would it be ethical to decline company A's offer after accepting it?

2) If I'm on the verge of declining company A's offer, should I tell company B that I already accepted an offer from company A but would like reconsider it and probably switch to company B's offer?

I would appreciate your opinion. TIA.
I think pairing all the time is one of our most important competitive advantages.

Thank god somebody finally makes a rational case for XP practices.

So much of the XP adherents amounts to hand-waving and foot-stomping. It's good to see somebody say "this is making us more competitive"

I've yet to see a similar argument made about TDD. It may be that TDD makes more sense as an add-on to pair programming (with ping-ponging) than as a stand-alone practice.
This might be more of a comment on the state of available tools, than the habits of programmers.

While some programmers will have the passion to make great UIs no matter how difficult or tedious the code becomes, a lot will simply find the first thing that gives them the results they need. (In fact, even when their end goal is to make something nice, they may still start with something ugly to make sure that everything else is working.)

There's really only two ways to solve that: give them more time to ship and make "great UI" a clear deliverable (that they're paid for), or give them better tools and expect correspondingly-better results in the time originally allotted.

Assuming your company isn't producing just one product, it's usually wiser to invest in the programming tools. That way, you pay most of the cost once, during development and perfection of the tools, instead of having every single product pay a penalty as programmers and QA have to correct cosmetic and behavioral imperfections in the UI in 1000 places.

Take Interface Builder and Cocoa on Mac OS X. The design of the layout tool, combined with the unapologetic adherence to MVC and KVC design principles in the API, means that interfaces are easier to do elegantly than inelegantly. So it should come as no surprise that the resulting programs, relative to the amount of time spent, tend to be more functional and easier to use compared to equivalents on competing platforms.
I can't emphasize the body language part enough. A lot of the time, and I have been guilty of this, people go on and on about a project they're working on, even when they sort of notice the other party not interested, hoping that the person's mind will change once they hit some critical part of their monologue, or that once done, the person listening will evaluate the idea as a whole and finally get it.

Learning how to pick up on the nuances of body language is really important. The angle at which the person you're talking to is standing, their eye movement, how engaged they are, are all cues to their level of interest. If a person isn't standing parallel to you, that could mean that they're preparing to walk off, or are opening the ground for others to enter, and if you pick up on that, quickly move to what you want and end it. If you keep going, it's more than likely that the person really isn't listening to a word you're saying and cannot wait until you're done. Shifty eyes, or occasionally smiling at passer-byers, etc, are also signs that the conversation isn't really going anywhere.

Being able to read body language in general is good skill to have (interviews, friendly interactions, etc).
Could be partly the little bureaucrats guide to heaven.
Amazon Text Stats
everything i'd like to read is normally already stored here on HN.
Sorry, but I don't see where you are getting the idea that you have a 'right to not want to waste bandwidth'. That is your choice, not a right, so if you don't want to waste bandwidth then don't use high bandwidth sites.

While I can certainly see why someone would want to use Instapaper and that it clearly has a lot of benefits for the user, that doesn't change the fact that their app operates in a grey area of copyright infringement.

Just because something is practical does not mean that it is therefore legal.