skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What are these, anyhow?

Integrated debugging. (I know gdb is incredibly powerful, but it seems too much to have to reprogram my brain for yet another editor within an editor.) Errors and warnings appearing while I type. Ctrl+click to go to source for any function I'm viewing. Variable and function auto-complete. Integrated documentation for functions that appears as I am typing. Quick and easy navigation of a file hierarchy. (I know vi and emacs allow this but it requires a level of mastery and key memorization for benefits that seem far from clear to me.) Managing project settings. Refactoring.

For someone that has achieved mastery over Unix over many many years, these things either seem unnecessary or they have a substitute (that's perhaps even better). However, I guess I'm wondering if there is a group of people who aren't old programmers from the 80s who started with something like Visual Studio or Eclipse, used it enough to achieve a level of mastery over programming that way (with a brain trained to use the mouse), and then after that found a gain switching to command-line type tools, that was worth the many many additional hours of brain re-training.
Although I've often wished such a thing existed, you run into a significant set of problems with accuracy. For example, the Mormons are big on genealogy; many of them are extremely reliable sources, but many are not--e.g., their genealogy files contain "Noah" and similar figures.

On the other hand, if the information is accurate, it raises major privacy concerns. Most reliable sources will not display the backgrounds of living people to the general public. If this were world-write, what's to stop someone from adding my grandparents, parents (thereby giving away my mother's maiden name), and myself without my knowledge? I might not want pieces of this information known--for example, if I were 1/8 $RACE and I lived in an area with a strong prejudice against $RACE, I would not want that fact known. I might not even be aware of this lineage myself--it could come as a real surprise, and possibly an unpleasant one.
Agreed, but I was just pointing out a clear non-sequitur in the parent post. People should use logic when making a point.
Maybe Bluetooth instead of/ in addition to USB?
What if civil engineers could file a patent that looked like that following:

A method and system for crossing a body of water via a constructed object. The customer starts on one side of the water and walks across the object to the other side.

Your average software patent is roughly equivalent to a patent on the concept of a bridge. If there are useful software patents, they've been overshadowed by the large number of abusive ones.
The costs of a split brain
Interesting read about this project from wired.

[Human Family Tree: Shallow Roots] http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2006/07/71298?curren...

First common ancestor 1000 A.D.!
MBPs use MDP, MBs use MiniDVI
yeah. I dono. I mean, a lot of my verbal recommendations are "S/he is really good at X, but has problem Y, and Would probably work well for the position you have." I dono how that would always translate in 'on your permanent record' type things. It's probably not even the best in person, sometimes.

I remember a few years back I was vacating a position as a contractor, and I was asked for recommendations. So, at the time my business was contracting, and I didn't really need as much help as I had. I recommended they hire one of the guys who was working for me but it was a "well, he can do the job, but here are what's wrong with him. I recommend you hire him"

The client didn't bite. later the body shop/recruiter who had gotten me the gig asked for recommendations, and I said the same thing. Apparently he talked the client into hiring my guy, and the client was pretty happy with the guy for a year or so. (the client hired me again when the guy left.)

Would it have been better for the client if I was good at sales and able to directly sell the guy? maybe.

(my other minor nit was that nobody gave me a kickback. Eh, I did get the guy to work for me at way below market wages for a year or two, so I got something out of it.)

But the upshot is when I give a recommendation, I see it as doing a favor to the company or person that has the open position more than a favor to the person I'm recommending. I mean, if I didn't think you were qualified, I wouldn't have recommended you for the gig, right? sometimes my recommendations are in the format "person X is perfect for the job, but you are unlikely to catch his interest"

On LinkedIn, though, it is different. the recommendations are setup as if you were doing a favor to the person you are recommending, which makes it much harder for me. I mean, how much of the negative stuff do you put in? hell, change the situation and a massive flaw becomes a massive advantage.
http://familysearch.org

and in beta:

http://new.familysearch.org

http://pilot.familysearch.org
i use a file that looks like this:

" session.vim
tabe file1
tabe file2
tabe file3
...

when i start work, i do gvim -S session.vim and i'm all set.
Software to help take an ebay business to the next level:
- seamlessly manage both prospects and customers,
- dead-simple accounting
- some wizard-based basic analytics to figure out which products/customers represent your best shot of making profit.
Or is it that if you spend 13+ years with any tool, you get very intimate and familiar with it, learn to appreciate its strengths, and don't have an objective view anymore as to the weaknesses. (Especially weaknesses during the first year when you weren't a master.)

I guess to compare, you'd have to have used an IDE with GUI for 13 years too? I bet you'd be very effective that way too.
Oh my... I was aiming for funny.

But I also bet it's accurate.
For those of you who use Netbeans there is jVi ( http://jvi.sourceforge.net/ ) a fairly faithful Vi emulator.

Also, Komodo Edit ( http://www.activestate.com/komodo_edit/ ) is a modern free, multi-platform editor which has nice Vi support.
http://astartupaday.wordpress.com/2007/04/19/startup-31-thin...
Seriously. I thought the whole article was interesting, but then I read that and I was like "Are you kidding me?". I love the theory of evolution and all... but why toss it in their randomly... it made no sense whatsoever. It definitely discredited the article and the scientists involved.

"Maybe it will help us achieve our end goal and people will realize that it's stupid to vote Democrat!" would have been comparable...
The only conditions that must be true in my reasoning is that (1) an early non-founding employee faces substantially higher risk than a corporate job, (2) at lower pay and with substantially less equity than would compensate for that risk.

That the risk was higher for the founders prior to the FTE is certainly true, but irrelevant, because we are not comparing whether an FTE has a good risk/reward tradeoff relative to an opportunity to join earlier in the startup under the same terms, but rather relative to a corporate job.
I tried a separate post of this but didnt get much response. So round two:

In short, more and more people are going to college which makes getting into "top" colleges harder. I know there has been a lot of discussion as to the worth of the college degree these days, but regardless, I think the overwhelming majority of people still believe you should go to the best (highest ranked? best fit? whatever) college you can. The site hopes to "level the playing field" by connecting students with private college counselors at various price points in various locations. Ideally, I would like to include calendaring, planning, and video conference/recording functionality.

Anyway, here's the presentation:

http://www.slideshare.net/secret/ATXWVjJNHk89Le
The old MB's are MDVI. The new MB's are MDP.
Not to mention how unpleasant would be the fact that another man adds one as his son (and he's not lying).
there was not description of how test was conducted but sample of 17 for 2 nights does not make the results very confident to me. the half that took the spray might have randomly having better memory unless they switched them next night.
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=lmacvittie
The real reason that capitalism is so crash-prone.
One thing would push this like nothing else, mobile phones with enough computing power in them to drive a sizeable display through something like bluetooth (but faster).
I get that they are still a startup, but they are a funded startup. It was a great demo, but still it seems like TC50 should be restricted to companies who have yet to do a series A round.
I participated in the interview of a dev candidate who had the same answer. "I really can't think of anything I've failed at." This was so implausible that on the basis of that answer alone I voted "no hire"
Using GoDaddy SSL Certificates with NGINX
Hopefully experts-exchange will be added to that list...
FSF offering "GNU Bucks" for finding nonfree works in free distributions
Because it has been so abused.

I would not have much trouble with a patent on the concept of public/private keys, but patents today are too expensive to get, obscure to read and cover extremely simple material.

In addition software patents lasts way the equivalent of several hundred years because the field moves so fast, imagine that basic concept behind the steam engine was still patented today.
I am lucky to have such a university. From the "Results" section, for those who are curious:

Recall of emotional texts was clearly superior to that of neutral texts, both at learning (45.1+/-2.4% of the emotional texts vs. 26.4+/-1.7% of the neutral texts correctly recalled; P<0.001) and at retrieval testing (41.3+/-2.4 vs. 22.2+/-1.7%; P<0.001). With IL-6 intrana- sally administered before sleep, subjects recalled more content words from emotional texts at retrieval testing after sleep compared with placebo (P<0.03) (Fig. 2A), whereas the recall of content words from neutral texts was comparable with both treatment conditions (P>0.32; P<0.03 for the IL-6/placebo x emotional/ neutral interaction). Memory performance on the visuospatial 2-D object-location memory task measured in the number of correctly recalled matching card locations and procedural finger sequence-tapping task measured in the accuracy of the sequences were not affected by IL-6 (P>0.33 for all comparisons) (Table 1).

Plus more...email me if you're really interested.
We do that too.
When you sell a mechanical tool, the user can take it apart and construct a similar tool on his own. This will take the advantage of innovation done by the engineer without paying him much. The patent protects the engineer from this exploitation. The users cant take apart a closed source software and reconstruct it. Now a days with few of the arm cores I have worked with, you cant even step through some proprietary code which is running. When you already have protection why would you want a patent. Another thing is the large companies abusing the patents and threatening some new companies.
And anything referring to 'sedo'.
Elance for local people only. So no overseas professionals allowed. Wouldn't make any money though. I suck at ideas.
Well, sort of. While you can use multiple frameworks, you have to be careful to keep your pages from getting really heavy.
Please direct your hate towards anyone in Congress in 1998, when the DMCA was passed unanimously.
I doubt the video would be impressive. It was the feeling of everyone in the room going through this process simultaneously:

I don't get it - neat - holy crap - is this real? - Holy Crap!! This is real!?!?! - Wait, did he just say $20 million in revenues? - Why have I never heard of this before? - $20M?!?!

There's a feeling in the air when 500 people all have the same amazed reaction that doesn't come through video.

Particularly fun was watching Marissa Mayer's reaction when he started talking about Pay Per Useful Call.
Regarding the second recruiter, I wouldn't put too much stock in a recruiters opinion. Do whatever you want to do in life and don't worry too much about hitting the "ceiling." If you are on this forum then you probably are above average when it comes to programming and a smart boss would be able to see that programming language experience is secondary to problem solving and personal skills.
Why are you being so ageist? Old software is the stuff that's grizzled and survived all comers. It's the stuff that people like enough to drag along with them into the future porting to new architectures, operating systems, windowing systems as they go. Not because some company wants to push it but just because it really is that good.

If it's so great, why do you even have to market it? Wouldn't it just sell itself?

Countering this is a common meme in HN articles - that you can't just write some polished software in a room somewhere and expect people to beat a path to your door for it.
Patents, like copyright, are not a theoretically pure framework like physics or maths. They're a very pragmatic give-and-take agreement designed to achieve a certain result. According to the US constitution, that aim is "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts".

In-so-far as software patents do not achieve that aim, they are worthless.

(the same, btw, could be said of copyrights, but not, interestingly, of many other kinds of patents)
The new MB's that are not yet released?

The current white MB has MiniDVI.
Lots of companies had already raised funds - Clasemovil raised half a million, Clicker has 8 million, lots were self-funded by people with exits under their belt, etc. The only requirement was you had to do your first public release at TC50. The judging criteria were useful demo, attractive, professional, polished design, and useful business, and the first three favor those with funding.
Sorry, but the MacBooks (not pro) that apple sells are still MDVI [1], although I'm sure that will change in the next product refresh.

[1]http://store.apple.com/us/tab?node=home/shop_mac/family/macb...
There's a quote I've lifted from an old comic that I like to repeat to myself every now and then: "specialization breeds weakness"

The same can be said about learning a broad range of skills and not excelling in any of them. But for me I've been able to apply more useful ideas from other fields to my core competency than the opposite.
I'm working on http://vldtr.com . Although it might not make me a lot of money, it does allow me to learn about marketing, which is not my strength.
That's pretty much correct.
What was her reaction? (that part doesn't come through on the video at all)
5 minutes followed by a sweet aha! moment.

What the article seems to miss, though (only skimmed it), is that you need to be incredibly careful with taking kwargs, specially if you're passing them along into secondary functions within the called function. Hidden bugs lie that way, as you could end up with bad/misspelled args that you think are having an effect, but aren't.

Always make sure all kwargs get unpacked.
Many software patents I've read seem totally invalid. But there are a few I think may be reasonable. For example, many audio/video codecs like the ones in the MPEG standards are developed by companies who make money through patent licensing. And for the most the ideas in these patents are far from "obvious."

You could argue about whether these patents are good or bad for society, but at least in these cases the patent system is operating as designed: allowing companies to profit from novel research through a temporary monopoly on the results.
and Congress in 2009 for not noticing that this thing is broken
I agree.

Closed source software + Patents = Oxymoron
Noupe acquired by Smashing Magazine
Tougher enforcement would work. There's an inherent record of the crime, after all. A few teens would be caught texting while driving after car crashes. Make a few into examples, and you'll curtail this. Especially if there are some cool alternatives. (A voice command texting app for the iPhone? Say one that sends a ETA? Perhaps answers yes, no, or tldr;)
She is dead wrong, with a caveat.

Specialists tend to be very attractive to large corporations, where the role is "css designer" or "Oracle database development" or "email administrator". The company can afford the FTE to dedicate to the task with that level of detail, so of course the better you are specialisted, the better will stack up against others.

An "oracle database developer" however is useless to a smaller company though, because they can't afford to hire a development team of 200. They need people (for example) that can develop in Oracle, MS SQL and Postgres, and also Python to properly import the data from their latest acquisition. The exposure to different environments and technologies, along with the method of working where you realize you don't know it all, is therefore key.

My personal bias is that I find the latter style much more engaging and effective overall. Having worked in both environments, I find generalists much more flexible and in the end, capable, when dealing with things that aren't fully documented or expected. Specialists tend to be very "insular " in their thinking, looking to solve every problem within the scope of their knowledge. If you want to grow in business, however, flexibility is the key.

It is simply impossible to know what tomorrow's challenges will be. If you don't think so, go talk to some ColdFusion developers, if you can find them. :-)
How about an website that collects/harvests good startup ideas? Like what we're doing on this HN page?
Open source proponents need to realize that, while it is possible for the Supreme Court to enter a ruling making software non-patentable, this likely is wishful thinking.

The authority for patent laws ultimately comes from the Constitution and finds its implementation in statutes passed by Congress. There is nothing in either the Constitution or in the existing patent statutes that expressly allows courts to limit process or business method patents (the type at issue in the case before the Supreme Court) to those that pass the so-called "machine-or-transformation" test imposed by the lower court. Thus, it is by no means assured that such a relatively narrow test will be upheld. If it is not, then the looser standards likely will be back in play, meaning that a broad variety of process patents (include software-related) will be capable of being granted.

For those interested, this case has generated huge interest in the tech world and, as of a couple of months ago, at least 44 such companies had filed briefs with the Court (for what it is worth, most of them favor rejecting the lower court's ruling and thereby letting more process patents be issued). A good summary of the positions appears here: http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2009/08/briefs-in-bilski.htm....

I am not saying that software patents shouldn't be abolished - just that such a result is highly unlikely to come from any ruling in this case.
One question we need to answer first is that are new frameworks, practices and methods simply a fashion and reinventing the wheel or is it because the pace of change of software industry is so fast that we need to have new innovations every couple of years in order to keep up with it?
How this differs from paypal? I understand that for you to propose this there is some fundamental difference, just I can't figure it.
Are you sure that's the typical software patent?

Some famous law-suits were about patents that are far less trivial than your bridge example.

For example, Pixar holds a patent on Monte Carlo sampling, and has sued or threatened a number of companies that used any sort of randomization in their rendering algorithms. This despite the fact that Monte Carlo methods have been known and used for many decades before Pixar was started. The issue here is not that the concept of Monte Carlo integration is trivial, but instead that Pixar's contribution to it is so tiny compared to the previous state of the art that it should not give them a "right" to own the whole field.

Similarly, some lawsuits were about compression algorithms if I remeber right. Same issue here - it's not that a given compression algorithm is trivial, it is more the fact that it is probably a tiny increment on the top of existing compression techniques, and anybody that also builds on the known ideas should not be threatened by loosely related patents.

Of course, patents are a problem that should be addressed, but I don't think trying to prove that software patents are somehow different than others is the right way.
This depends entirely on the business you are trying to build. Trying to generalize this into 2 people == 2 programmers == success isn't going to work in a vast majority of situations. Who's going to do business development if you have corporate clients? Who's going to do visual design?(programmers? Yikes!) Who's going to deal with investors and press?

This product didn't fail because there was only one programmer (heck I'm pretty sure digg started with obyrne and Kevin Rose). Fundable failed because it poorly managed itself.
This post comes up regularly on HN, and a comment like yours is pretty much guaranteed to accompany it.

I wonder why such a site has yet to exist?
A web/mobile app that will allow users to request information (text, audio clip, photo or video clip) from each other, anonymously and in real-time, based on their global location. Human Powered Search?
Now I can finally explain my superpowers to the world. :-)
Niekamp Tool Company 
Niekamp Tool located in Kingston New York provides quality machined and stamped parts. CNC Machining and Drilling along with production stamping allow Niekamp to service total metal fabrication requirements. Stock to Dock Delivery and quality systems allow Niekamp tool customers great flexiblity in metal needs.
Is that an eMachines under the engineer's desk?
Some of the ideas are more whimsical than others, but the halfbakery [1] has existed for quite a while.

"The Halfbakery is a communal database of original, fictitious inventions, edited by its users. It was created by people who like to speculate, both as a form of satire and as a form of creative expression."

[1]http://www.halfbakery.com/
It's been tried but what do you support?

It has to do powerpoint, with the ability to do the latest version's transition effects a flash movies. People have to be able to just turn up and not need to have converted their presentation in advance
>How this differs from paypal?

My assumption is that it won't involve paypal. :-)

Seriously though, that's the difference - some way to avoid the third party lock in that paypal forces, replacing it with a simple: "money from my account into your account" method.
sciencedaily.com - no exactly HN material
The issue with that site is that it lives up to it's name. I think you'd need to launch any real idea site from a forum like HN. It's the people submitting and evaluating the idea that will make it work.
Open source credit scores and history.

Take down the oligopoly of the existing credit scoring companies by providing an open algorithm to determine scores. Change it as necessary. Educate people on how to improve the score. Provide the data to consumers for free, charge others (banks, mortgage companies, etc.) to use it.
Nose - python - easier tests writing.
The same way you vet any employer. Find references. Talk to people. Go to LinkedIn and find 3 people who worked for the guy and ask for their opinions.

Yeah, shit happens. But what you want to vet for is what this guy experienced. Ethics, loyalty, temper, commitment, smarts, cooperation, etc. That doesn't guarantee that you won't have a bad experience, but it helps a lot.

If you go into ANY job knowing nothing about your employer/manager/leader other than what you read on their web site and heard about in the interview, you're doing yourself a disservice. Going into a startup like that is like a professional equivalent of a mail order bride.
http://www.geni.com/ is pretty close. Started by a former PayPal guy, I believe.