skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bought libraries are static; you can't get them changed.
Open source may be architected wrong; not componetized the way you need; have bugs; build on the wrong platform...BUT you can fix all that. There is probably something in there you need, that has already been debugged, and that's why I consider Open Source first.
I don't normally submit my own blog articles to YC but I thought this one might be interesting as it includes some of my time tracker data before and after starting up.

It's also the time of year when a lot of questions about solo YC applicants get asked. I don't think I would recommend it unless you _really_ like what you do - this is the only thing I have ever done where long days on one project wouldn't cause me to get a bit frazzled.

Curiously I now spend more time talking to people, and especially new people, than I ever did while working for someone else. Working from home is much more social than it is made out to be.
My guess is just not wanting to duplicate functionality. The loader needs to figure out what libraries to load at runtime, and it's easier and more reliable to just ask the loader than to write code that does the same thing.
How does your CMS help?
Isn't it great how technology enables us to do achieve the same end result in new ways?
Sir Clive Sinclair. I wrote a letter to him with an idea that I had for a way to interface a joystick to the ZX-81 and he sent me a personal reply of encouragement.
I've actually noticed the inverse problem with some non-tech-related searches. Politics is a fine example: try and find an article about a 2002 House vote on Social Security and there's no chance you'll find it; the results are all present day.

Strange that with regard to current events the web seems to have little historical memory, and yet with regard to current technology it has too much.
I thought of Raymond Chen, too! I Googled until I found the entry you found, but also this one (http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/05/08/592350....), which has the observation:

Code injection doesn't become a security hole until you have elevation of privilege.

Chen's the one who originally made me realize the distinction between tricking someone into running a program, and an actual security vulnerability.
regarding problems and engineering, lets see how brooks puts it:

"Essential complexity is caused by the problem to be solved, and nothing can remove it"

so the kind of complexity with have to tackle comes from the area of application we are in, not the programming task itself. its not about writing pretty, bugfree java code. let's assume your java is 100% perfect. there still remains the essential complexity of the problem.

now if the problem is in any way related to humans (a lot of software has to be 'a solution' for humans) then there is no way to proof a solution to be The Right One. hence B/B testing. this is at some stages the way to got.

show something & get feedback from the user, who knows more about the problem (himself) than you. this of course doesn't mean it's all blind trial&error - well in a way it is, but humans get better at that over time.

disclaimer: if you program the fuel-control for a rocket that is 30 years old, you can of course calculate the correct solution and resolve all essential complexity to mathematical formulas.

interestingly this was not the case for the first rocket-programmers, since the rockets kept changing every few month :)
The breathless claim of a "high end computer" stuck out to me also. The iMac computer parts are one step up from bargain bin. They aren't the cheapest possible, but on a scale with two ends, they aren't near the "high" end of that scale.

I also like the author's math, a 25% price difference isn't much?

sigh
I flipped my monitor at work to 1200 x 1920. Excellent for almost everything, except working with some dusty old collaboration tool which has problems with flexibility.
I had exactly the same thought. Google just might have to buy a license from Apple.
My brother Richard Altmaier, who drove his Pacer to Silicon Valley straight out of college and never looked back.
A 'bet' produces no value. It is a fixed pot of money that a middleman may take a cut from before distributing the remainder to the people who have paid into the pot. The pot is static. The participants never get more out than they collectively put in.

Shares and derivatives on the other hand are linked to the price of an asset which may increase in value. When people buy and sell them they change the price of some aspect of the asset and therefore re-allocate capital to the most efficient and profitable investment. Done correctly the participants are making money, not 'betting'. The size of the 'pot' can go up.
I think it's hard with a generic search page to get good results. Like other people commented if it appears in Wikipedia, MySpace, or Facebook those results will be first almost everytime. I built a page in javascript (http://www.bygsearch.com/) to aggregate & combine the results from Yahoo, Bing and Google which is sometimes better because of the quirks in each search engine. I was going to add some specific search verticals like /programming or /travel and combine results from different sources. Like maybe use github and google code in programming and combine with certain sites like stackoverflow while specifically blocking any result from experts exchange or a list of other crappy forums.
$1700 for the next to lowest end offering is too high. Dell doesn't even break $1000 territory until you get to their upper end offerings. For $1700 you could buy two computers and a laptop (or two computers and two netbooks).
It makes sense. It's a free and open source operating system for mobile devices. It's based on the Linux kernel which many developers are aware of and have experience with. It's backed by Google. Customers want it. Handset makers want to compete with the iPhone. There's a decent number of applications already built for it. There's room for customization so that each manufacturer can differentiate their Android from the other Android units. Why spend your own money developing something that's likely to be inferior?
Hah. This morning I just realized that I said "fascination" instead of "fascinating". I should learn to not multi-task when commenting.
Sorry, that's supposed to have a "Premier" badge on it so you're not totally ambushed with the subscription page. I'm not sure where it went, though. I'll go find it!

EDIT

Aaaand there's some text there now.
Is there anywhere I could download the full video from?
LG Claims that their e-IPS panels should be the same price as TN parts.

http://www.displayblog.com/2009/01/28/lg-display-lpl-23-e-ip...
That's a potentially deadly problem I call "management by managers".

One can also refer to Scott Adams' point-haired boss character for further enlightenment.
Normally C compilers push arguments right-to-left, so probably evaluate them that way too.
Still can't explain x=2 coming out 3 tho...
Mind bender: How tall is your coffee mug?
OK, this isn't speficially about coffee mugs, it's about perception. Stay with me, there are lessons for entrepreneurs, but first you should play the game.

Take your favorite mug. Look at it closely, and imagine wrapping a piece of string around it once. Now image taking that piece of string and holding one end against the base. How high will it reach?

As high as the rim? 20% higher? 60% higher? Take the time to try to visualise it.

Now do it.

If the result surprises you, then you've got something from this exercise. But if not, read on.

Now go and try it on people you know, or people you don't know if you have the courage. See what they think. See if they're surprised by this result.

I pretty much guarantee that they will be. And if you weren't, it serves as a reminder that your customers aren't you!

It doesn't matter if you like your product, or think it's usable, or think it's great. What matters is your customers opinions, not yours.

Of course, it helps if you like what you sell.
To help visualise ...

http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=coffee+mug
"(Also, there is a lot of garbage on the Internet. For some unknowable reason, "moon landing" gives 3.6M results on Google, while "moon landing hoax" gives 3.9M results...)"

I think that's because Google includes pages that have any of the keywords you supply, unless you tell it to do differently. Some examples:

http://google.com/search?q=moon+landing+hoax : about 3,190,000

http://google.com/search?q=moon+landing : about 3,030,000

http://google.com/search?q=%2Bmoon+%2Blanding+%2Bhoax : about 297,000

http://google.com/search?q=%2Bmoon+%2Blanding : about 3,010,000

So there aren't more pages about the moon landing hoax than there are about the moon landing, there are just more pages that say the words moon OR landing OR hoax.

Regardless of this example your point stands, there's a lot of garbage on the internet :)
I feel stupid now that I noticed there wasn't any cool pictures of arbitrarily human faces evolving 10 generations - or did I miss something?
I'd really, really like my investor to feel "invested" in MY company. If she wants to use the posessive pronoun I will be the very last person on Earth to correct her.
Not in my country. And if they do they don't have money to hire administrator. Son in law of the owner can usually take care of things well enough.
tech has always been hard for me, even with plusses and quotes. searches like "uboot arm cross-compile error xyz" always turned up miles of mailing lists that never amounted to anything.

on a similar note - http://guillaume-nargeot.blogspot.com/2009/08/think-twice-be... (probably saw this on HN)
Being an entrepreneur makes you a better person
Solar superpower: Should Europe run on Sahara sun?
The Copenhagen Consensus deals pretty much entirely with this question:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global...
I think that's in no small part due to the problem Dropbox solves. Don't forget this problem has been "solved" about a gazillion times before, but the lack of polish made those "solutions" unusable in practice.
Here are two.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824005...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824176...
Is Open Source Good for the White House?
Dell is usually a good benchmark to compare against. But yeah, you can usually find anything Dell is selling a bit cheaper elsewhere.
I think Matz or some well known and respected "rubyist" needs to write a Ruby equivalent of Python's Pep 8 (there are some style guides out there on the internet but are mostly written in the "someone might disagree with me so here are 5 options for doing x" style) as there are a lot of stylistic things which ruby beginners always get slammed with.

For example, blocks or pseudo named paramaters with hashes are in no official documentation (that I've found) recommended (or discouraged) over other methods but a "rubyist" will often question a beginner over their use of x, y or z.

Edit: clarification, spelling and grammar.
> Unfortunately, this method isn't scalable, but it will give you a good start.

Perhaps, if you cheat? Let somebody else hand-write your notes. (Although you still need to create the content.)
Oladele on Get Glue
He did say $80K.
Bob Parsons.

I know I may catch flack for that, but the guy didn't attend an Ivy League or Stanford level school, didn't live in the valley, but also started two successful tech companies without VC money. His methods and marketing are different, but he's bound to break convention as he grew up so far from the web/software conventions of the day.
when I got my Macbook Alu - I got baffled by its high quality and sleekness. The 13" Macbook Alu was a bargain relative to its quality. When I experienced the unboxing, I felt like a 16 year old virgin girl..and I'm a boy.. ehehe

One year later - and there are still no other company that can offer a similar high quality laptop. Thinkpad has pretty much crashed and burned after china got their hands the product management.

I guarantee you that this 27" will provide a first time apple owner with a unboxing experience you will never forget. It will simply raise the bar for how you perceive quality.
Cool way to catch exceptions in Perl: Try::Tiny
From Novice to Adept: Embracing Perl Idioms
You said what I was going to say and you're absolutely correct. This must be the stupidest comment and opinion I've read in a long time:

The skeptical attitude toward Google was best summed up by Donna Trivison, Director of IT for Ursuline College, who wrote, “There seems to be some conventional wisdom that Google is the answer to what’s been wrong over the years in the Microsoft universe. That kind of thinking may be dangerous. As consumers of technology we need to keep each and every business partner honest and working for us. Handing trust carte blanche over to Google because, as the wisdom goes, they are good citizens, seems misguided to me. If I had to pick one, it would probably be Microsoft because they have withstood the scrutiny their misdeeds have landed them. Google remains, for the most part, untested.”
Gemcutter to become default gem host
Such a great presentation from Paul. I particularly like the piece on competitors, not worrying about them, and believing in your approach to the market and product. Go get em!
Quote from Google employee:

It does work as described! - which may very well not be as desired.
If you want a more mathmatical-logical use of operators then you need to go find another search engine.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?tid=...

I am afraid that Google is now more of a 'social search engine' than a 'hacker search engine'.
Wake up people. Did you forget about the Apple TV? This is exactly the kind of thing that could open the flood gates in that area. It doesn't make sense for your personal computer, or your iPod Touch but it makes a lot of sense for a TV appliance.
This is definitely a cool feature.

edit okay, go ahead and downvote, apparently bidirectional connection ports in lieu of mono-directional ones are not a cool feature to somebody.
Why Five: Hacking our Senses
Funny how those kinds of calculation fail to take into account how people were slacking of before twitter and facebook.

I guess there wasn't articles titled 'Reading newspapers at work costs economy 2bn' because offline slacking off is harder to monitor.

Shouldn't something be done about the way we work to get real and take into account that human cannot concentrate on boring tasks for 8 hours a day without breaks?
Not overall, but I have found Google frustrating for things that are very recent. For instance I wanted to watch Obama's speech to the schoolkids on YouTube (the day after he'd given it), but the only videos Google would bring back were from his race speech in Philadelphia. I tried all the operators and keywords I could think of, and couldn't get what I wanted.

FWIW, Bing nailed it on the first query.
I think it's also a function of people trying to game how Google's engine operates.
So to summarize:

"Microsoft sucks, but I know their stuff, and I'm too afraid to change."

Also, 12 people, from companies of which I've heard of two (NAMICO and Lincoln Financial) do not a comprehensive poll make.
Dell doesn't sell a 27-inch 2560 by 1440 LED display. I would pay $1000 for it today if it were for sale. Some people would pay more than me.
n = 12 ?

i'd love to see this poll done with startups: founders that were in diapers when DOS was launched. also, for the 8 that voted microsoft, what do their organizations as a whole vote toward?
It was probably "meant to be used" (or at least originally written) on a physical terminal rather than a terminal emulator.

Nothing wrong with moving with the times. A graphical emacs session does offer plenty of benefits, not least having less hassle with keybindings, and much greater flexibility with fonts and colours.
Positive thinking!
The main difference between saying "Download this file and double-click it" and saying "run ldd on this file" is that it is surprising to at least the author (and me) that ldd does in fact execute code in that file.
GOTO 10

I love this guy
Watching windows logo while your computer boots up is kind of waste. You already bought up this windows thingie and won't be buying another one for a couple of years, so why not present you with Big Star logo or Mc Donalds or something else.

Pausing your boot up process to show you the commercial is completely different (complete no no) thing.

Actually having apple logo on lid of your laptop is also a waste for the same reasons. Jobs should strike a deal and put Mc Donalds logo there.
Well, A 2006 report on global mortality rates [1] suggests that regardless of country, the average human does reach sexual maturity. It follows that fitness, amongst humans, isn't significantly affected by survival / longevity. After all, if we live to reproduce, then anything that sets in after that event is irrelevant from an evolutionary standpoint.

I could see that reasoning giving rise to the phrasing used in the article.

[1]: http://www.who.int/whosis/whostat2006_mortality.pdf
Google News has an archive search that is useful for that type of query.

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=2002+house+vote+socia...
You like that, type "edit" in CMD.EXE :-)
I hope that:

* They quit moving things around.

* That the username-gemname thing from github disappears. I want to have one official gem. Genuine forks in the sense of people deciding to develop the project in a different direction should have to pick a new name.
I also attended this conference in Toronto. I didn't like the last two thirds of the talk one bit. There is plenty of evidence that explains why less females are in software development (and in general, science) there is also plenty of science that disputes anthropogenic global warming (and also plenty of science that supports it). The speaker made highly emotionally charged statements that were in the opposite spirit of his whole thesis: DATA and ANALYSIS should drive opinions and decisions, not emotions. All of this is besides the point. What does global warming or Rush Limbaugh have to do with the science behind software development organization?

While he is absolutely correct that software development lacks rigorous testing of effective methods (agile vs waterfall), he allows, openly, volunteers (!) to be part of his test group ("I'll post my email") after already telling them what he is testing. This makes his inquisition of the most effective method even worse than nothing at all. By taking in biased volunteers he makes his numbers look like they achieve statistically validly, while failing to take a true cross-section of software developers.

My favorite talk of the night was the Ruby guy. Clean, unemotional, understandable, interesting, informative. I almost expected him to end with "live long and prosper."
I posted this article last week and someone killed it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=894571
The Left Fold, a weekly programming article digest
Twitter costs British economy less than people who gaze out the window
She must have a fucking Klein bottle for a brain.
Having separate indexes and separate searches for sub-domains of knowledge is an interesting idea. The original idea of PageRank was that each link constituted a 'vote' for a page. Perhaps different epistemic communities on the internet use links to mean different things. So, the meaning of links on technical webpages is slightly different from the meaning of links on social websites. Interesting idea to play around with.
I was talking about the computers. $1700 is far too much for a low end system, monitor or no monitor. Those specs (sans display) are available for <$500. I'd put the price on this system at no more than $1400 at the high end. Apple is making a very nice margin on this kit.

But to that end the iMac isn't a LED display either, it's LED backlit.

If I could find a $1000 27" 2560x1440 LED or O-LED display I'd be in line in front of you.
Just because they patented something does not mean they plan to use it.

The title here is extremely biased.
A bet absolutely can produce value, it just can't produce money.

Consider a bet on a dice roll which is done solely for the purpose of entertainment (unlike bets on events which reveal information). The gambler gains utility from playing the game which presumably exceeds the utility lost due to the house take (otherwise, why bother playing).

Consider a simpler game: Street Fighter III. The house take is two quarters and you've got no chance of winning any money. Nevertheless, value is created since the players have a good time playing.
In case we needed more evidence that the current patent law is absurd.
LawCrunch: Some (more) ideas on why Nokia sued Apple
Will There Be an Android App Boom Soon?
Don't use this as a metric. The site:www.example.com syntax does NOT return all the pages in a site indexed by the search engine.
* We haven't moved anything yet, and there will be ONE move: to rubygems.org

* Totally agreed.
Startup Way of life: Love it or leave it
Net set for 'language shake-up'
Back to the Altavista days of +search +must +include +plus +signs +"and quotation marks"

Seriously, the problem is advanced users get unexpected results with the query expansion and refinement layers they've added on. While dropping obscure words is helpful when grandpa has misformed queries, it's maddening for a technical user looking for a very specific, infrequent keyword. However for grandpa, it's probably a better experience for a generalized result.

Using +'s works well enough, but it's disappointing we have to use a less efficient method of querying now.
Why do you build a startup? For the fun of it
Yes, and this is why I started Duck Duck Go: http://duckduckgo.com/. Thanks for posting specific cases--they help me immensely. Anyone else have more?
Ask HN: What are your best resume tips?
Here are some questions I'm coming across, but I'm curious to hear whatever you have discovered in general makes a good resume.

Should I include a skills section at the end? (It looks tacky, but I think a lot of places use automated searches?)

For each project I list should I include languages and tools used?

If I only have one publication is it worth having a publications section?
Financial derivatives have no relationship to derivatives in calculus

That's not quite true. As a stock option comes close to expiring, its value approaches the difference between the market price of the underlying instrument and the option strike price... as long as that difference is positive, of course. The complexity of financial derivatives comes from their nonlinearity; but if you buy a call option and sell a put option for the same strike price, you'll be precisely betting on the change in price.
The Rise of “Risk Capital”
The pagerank patent isn't really relevant anymore as the search algorithm has so many more components and variants now. Pagerank as it is defined is a much smaller signal than people think.
Just my experience:
I have been using textpad for ages, and I am still using it (v.4.7, for the reasons you mentioned). In the meantime, however, I had to learn emacs (for Slime etc.). Now I notice that when I open textpad I begin to miss emacs features. And on emacs, I miss the fancy GUI far less than I imagined.
Lazy and dumb programmers are ok until they discover copy-paste which unfortunately happens very early.
I really have to applaud your efforts on that front. I've been using duckduckgo on and off for some time now and I must say I'm mighty impressed. The best part is the keyboard style navigation and the big clean look. Always retain those two. :)
It's a normal Google url since Google started using ajax. I also get it when I go to google.co.uk and search for something.

See also here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=464393