skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is really interesting for me, because I'm working on this problem right now with my startup: CustomerFind.

Right now, CustomerFind.com is a Twitter application that automatically follows users on Twitter. You specify a set of keywords, and then automatically follow users who have a tweet mentioning one of those keywords. Presently, on average of ~15% of users will follow back, with good keywords typically generating a 30% follow back rate.

Unfortunately, there's really no way to know if those users are real customers who will use your product/pay you. So I'm working on evolving the service. How many of you would be interested in the next iteration? The idea is to create personal conversations with customers. I am considering the following features for candidacy.

1. You get a list of users who have a tweet mentioning any one of some prespecified keywords.

1a. You have an option to auto-follow these users.

1b. You can filter the list by geography, user popularity, and emotional inflection of the message.

2. You get a CRM tool to enable you to personally engage with users. Sachin: you noticed someone is looking for "sell videogames"? You then have an opportunity to start an @reply/DM conversation with them, within the product. This coincides with Seth Godin's philosophy of permission marketing: you get to reach out to people who really want to hear what you have to say.

2a. You get automated notifications to encourage you to follow-up with more messages. Following up is critical to any good sales methodology.

2b. Each sales/conversation thread contains the user's information, and other facts mined from the tweeting history to help target the conversation.

3. You can type in a competitor's screen name (or your own!), and figure out the most popular words or phrases that its followers are tweeting about. Helps you do better targeting for your own list. For example, you type in @TheNorthFace, and learn that people are talking about "cheap snow jackets".

Anyone interested? Note: if you object by saying "that's too many conversations to keep up with!", I'd like to note that's a problem that you desperately want to have.

-Zack
Xmonad 0.9 released The light, reliable, extensible tiling window manager
NetApps would be the reason. The biggest risk is Sun / Oracle lose the lawsuit and NetApps comes after Apple next.
An excellent online course for learning Ruby metaprogramming by Satoshi Asakawa.
A future is big data in the cloud.
Using http://xp-dev.com (eating own dog food)
I think I need to see the video. The transcript seems to be quite a bit rambling and hard to consume.
Previous thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=888488
I compared it to marriage (and yes, I am married) because when you start a company with someone, you're beholden to their weaknesses as well as benefiting from their strengths.

For example, if your co-founder only has 3 months of living expenses saved up, well you've got a deadline to get more money.

Plus in the YC-model startup, you're usually living in very close proximity with your co-founders, so you need to get along with them as roommates as well as partners.
"disclosure: Accel is an investor in Cloudera, the company behind Hadoop"

Um, kinda... no.

This is a decent article, and he's free to give a plug to his portfolio even if it's disguised as a disclosure. But it's disingenuous at best to call Cloudera "the" company behind Hadoop when 80% of the code flows from Yahoo. It's like calling Transmeta "the" company behind Linux.
No wonder you're having trouble getting users. Your product is pure evil. Stop helping spammers!!
Small Business HOWTO: Buy a networked copy/scan/fax/printer
It's much harder to explain impedance concisely. I, for one, never took a circuits class, and I wouldn't expect other CS programs to require one either.
Here's how to get access to the head (took some googling and tinkering):

1) Put editor in advanced mode by clicking on red arrow on top right (you have to be in advanced mode to override a variable)

2) Click 'Variables' link (now it is possible to 'override' the missing Head-tags variable).

3) Override the 'Head-tags' variable by clicking the "Define New Variable" button (even though we want to override)

4) Now you can paste in a tag like this:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://enter-url-here-to-your-store/favicon.ico type="image/x-icon" />

I love yahoo store, but it has some serious usability issues right now ;)
Jobs in many, if not most professions commonly will "take over your life" if you let them. In many cases it is expected.
All the scares induced by seeing a new competitor pop up are forgotten weeks later. It always comes down to your own product and approach to the market.

This quote and the other comments about overestimating your competition really stood out to me. It's true that as a Founder, your own ability to execute and find what customers want is what matters.
Sounds a lot like Alltop?
Well, Yahoo has done fuck all with it commercially..

You could say that MySQL isn't the company behind MySQL, too.

Cloudera is the only pure Hadoop company, really. They also distribute and maintain the machine images used by almost everyone, now. http://archive.cloudera.com/docs/ec2.html
We don't have a high demand, we have 10% unemployment, we don't need more people to take away jobs. This country is a country for Americans first, once we take care of our own, then we can start inviting more people to fill the demand.

Yes they do shit work for $8 an hour...but does that mean that you need to turn high paying professions into "shit work" just because the companies want to save a buck? Programming should not be an $8/hour job, no matter what kind of language you are using. Hell have you even read some of the code written by these guys? Calling it garbage would be insulting to garbage.

Oh please, lower wages for skilled labor doesn't mean squat for a company's bottom line. When you are making billions, paying a few less million in wages won't change anything.

Wages have ALREADY dropped to $10 an hour. Go hit up craigslist, PLENTY of companies looking for software developers with 5 years experience, and offering $10 an hour. And the screwed up thing, is that they'll get it. Some programmer, who's been out of work for a year or two, because the market is crappy, will do the job because he has to put food on the table. That is if he is lucky, because he'll have to compete with 100 other people for the position.

This is America, we need to take care of our own first, before we decide to help the rest. When the times are good noone cares about immigrants, but when you see people being laid off left and right to be replaced by incompetent immigrants...then it's time to put the foot down.

If you think increasing the # of people won't change anything you are smoking crack.

Why are they stupid? Are we blocking all immigrants? No, we are letting in the 65K like you mentioned. That just means that we are getting the cream of the crop. Why do you want to lower the quality? You only lower the restrictions when you are in need of more people. That is not the case now.

Hey I'm an immigrant myself, first generation too, and as someone who went through the process, I want STRICTER control on immigration. We came during the time when America needed new talent. That's not the case now. We are over capacity. Sorry, the country is full...come back when we recover.
Cradled in His Palms: The Genius of Dan Brown
bleghhh, maybe you are underestimating the joy/morale of writing what you want to write.

Prototype a cog in an afternoon; you'll have a much deeper understanding of how that cog should work, and you'll be a better judge of the available cogs.

FrankenCode is a perfectly viable strategy, but it's gross and boring.
Seriously, you're downmodding this? Write some C sometime, and watch the compiler output perfectly-optimized assembly for your architecture. You write a high-level solution to the problem, the compiler makes it work efficiently.

If it doesn't, it's a compiler bug, and should be fixed at that level.
Who are you to cast your fellow americans into poverty, death and dismay just because you have a hard-on for helping people.

Earth is not a magical place with rainbows and unicorns, you want to come to this country? Make us want you. Get a PhD or a Masters and you are good to go. My parents won the green card...TWICE...in the same year. So the odds mustn't be that hard.
deploying is one of those cornerstones that you need to get right once, right at the beginning. #twitter
Hey, we've just fixed this up - sorry about that :)

One of the problems with having too many things to focus on, I think :)
So, what's rule #0?
I think there are 2 good reasons for a startup to take over your life:

1. If your startup is succeeding wildly. If you were seeing amazing returns from your time(i.e. maybe you work 80 hours in a week but made $10,000 and growing or signed up 20,000 new users), it's hard to think about anything else. You realize that you have stumbled upon a rare opportunity and it's worth it to sacrifice other things for a short time.

OR

2. You don't know any better. The first time you do a startup it's hard to know if it's succeeding or not, and everything takes longer because you don't know what you're doing and you make more mistakes. But likely you've read tons of stories about startups that fit #1, and because you don't know any better you confuse cause and effect and think that working 100 hours is going to make your startup succeed.

These are the two good excuses that I can think of for dedicating a disproportionate amount of your time to your startup. My general advice is to not take it too seriously unless you've stumbled upon a number 1. Life is too short. And it's not too hard to do a startup and enjoy life at the same time if you don't make big mistakes.
Now, step back: who here wants to say any variant of "That isn't the same thing!", "That isn't possible!", or "You are insufficiently dedicated and will never be truly successful!"

I will. Your second and third obections are straw men, but the first sounds reasonable to me. I don't see a modestly demanding side-project from a day job (to use your terms) as quite the same thing as what the quotes in the OP are about.

You make a good point about some patterns being socially constructed. That could be a factor here, and an interesting one. But I think you spoil it by excessively extrapolating from your own situation. This is a more subtle question than that.

The startup I'm working on occupies the bulk of my life right now (I'm not sure I'd say "taken over", since it's a far from hostile occupation). I can't imagine doing what I'm doing in an arm's-length or part-time way, or even a full-time way in the 8-hours-a-day sense. It requires more creative energy and focus than anything I've worked on in the past. I can't turn that on and off. To try to fit it into a conventional rhythm would kill it. Certainly this has its downsides. But the conventional definitions of "balance" have their downsides too. The vast majority of people I observe whose lives are "balanced" by those definitions are simply not doing anything very ambitious or creative. Of course I'm not advocating imbalance as an alternative as such, but I do say that any real discussion of this question needs to take this fact into account. Most don't. (Find me one!) Most utter platitudes about "work-life balance" and stop there.

As an aside, listening to Tony Hsieh yesterday made a lightbulb go on about why I find the phrase "work-life balance" so... debasing. It's because it assumes that work is not life.
Tu Portal de Películas
Yeah, you're not married--you can't hide that stuff from a wife forever.
Please Criticize my Fitness Site that Stores Workout Programs
I want to create a site that can easily store workout programs. This is my first version. It would be a lot prettier but I'm learning and trying to get feedback asap
Clickable link. Thanks for any advice, input, whatever!

http://www.funniestlift.com

The reason I bought the name funniestlift was because after doing Olympic Lifting for a year I realized it's really hard and being upbeat about it is a much better outlook. I want to create a fun, free, and valuable website for programs of all types!

Hahaha the titles you guys are coming up with are making me laugh! Haha, the reddit meme made its way onto my site!
If you use tiled window managers, and haven't used Xmonad before, I highly recommend it. It's very lightweight, fast, non-buggy, and has a perfect (for me at least) little feature set.
I was a user of your service. and when I signed up, I started following so many spammers I had to kill the oauth hookup. I don't know what was wrong with it, but it kept auto following all the horrible horrible spammers and my follower list just filled up with really bad people. I had to manually go through my follower list and delete people. Good thing I didn't have thousands of followers or else it could have taken me days.
My grandfather was literally starving to death before he immigrated. Are you seriously claiming the (theoretical) minor reductions in earning caps (for unskilled labor) we're discussing are comparable?
>Yes, getting a second monitor would require playing with the "xrandr" command.

This is what I had to do to set up the projector as a monitor: `System -> Preferences -> Display.`

Easy as pie.
I'm in a similar situation, as I'm trying to decide whether or not to minor in statistics on top of computer engineering. From a hacker's perspective, I've found that playing around with the language R is the best way to relate to the field. Check our the tutorial R for Programmers linked from here: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/r.html
What are your thoughts on Computer Engineering?

ErrantX: I'd like to hear your thoughts on this as well (you mentioned you were an EE)
In my case, the unfair advantage for the last two years has been my CMS

Can you elaborate? I don't understand this in the age of Wordpress and Drupal...
I've used Xmonad for a few weeks now and it is simply great: "screen real estate" is never wasted, you get free brain cycles by never doing the nitty-gritty details of window arrangement manually again - you switch high level "layout algorithms" instead that arrange your windows differently.

Are you (like me) an Emacs user? You want to remap the Xmonad modifier-key (default is on left Alt a.k.a. Meta). Here is my solution:

xmodmap -e "clear Mod3"
xmodmap -e "clear Lock"
xmodmap -e "add Mod3 = Caps_Lock"
xmonad

taken from my ~/.xsession file - this remaps the "Caps Lock" key
as a "Mod3 key".

My ~/.xmonad/xmonad.hs looks like this:

import XMonad

main = xmonad defaultConfig {
modMask = mod3Mask
, terminal = "xterm"
}

Now I can use Caps Lock as Xmonad modifier key and Ctrl/Meta as I'm used to for Emacs (note that I have a PC 102 keyboard - if you have a keyboard with "Windows"-key you might use this key as modifier key instead and perhaps remap Caps Lock as your Control key...).
It’s Not My Company
This is the weirdest thing. You're explaining my own software to me. (The editor is the part of Viaweb I wrote.) I'd forgotten there was a head-tags variable. But thanks to you I've finally been able to get rid of the annoying Yahoo favicon.

Incidentally, you don't have to override head-tags. You can just change the global value on the Variables page.

Sorry about the usability issues. It was pretty good for 1997.
One of my favorites is "Limited life experience + overgeneralization = advice" from Bucheit, which I think has to be understood as an important qualifier on everything said throughout all sessions.

-t
I program C signal processing code on x86. Sure, it's usually sufficient for my needs, but "perfectly-optimized assembly"? Not for those tight loops where you really want it. It's decent and if you hold the compiler's hand will get vectorized somewhat, but the code is still heavy.
They were also their own target users. I'm sure they ate their own dog food quite a bit.
Promoters Beware Sharing Via Social Media Sites has just became much Easier
Caltweet it! Tool for Online promotion via social media sites. Automatically promote, create guestlist, autotweet, and invite friends to your various promotions and events.
Hey,

As a founder of Cloudera and a participant in the Apache Hadoop community, I'm dismayed whenever the press writes something about Cloudera "creating" Hadoop. No one here believes that, and we try to acknowledge the great work done by the community, especially at Yahoo!, Facebook, Amazon, Powerset, et al., whenever we can.

To the best of my knowledge, we're the only company to provide a commercially supported distribution of Hadoop. I'm pretty sure that's what Ping meant when he says "behind"--supporting, not necessarily solely creating.

Anyways, it's an open source project, and the copyright belongs to the Apache Software Foundation. In the case of Linux, no one organization contributes more than 13% of the code (e.g. http://lwn.net/Articles/222773/). The same distribution of contributions will likely be the case for Hadoop as it matures, and it's reasonably close to that state now: there are subprojects to which neither Yahoo! nor Cloudera is the primary contributor, and it is most certainly not the case that 80% of all Apache Hadoop code comes from any single organization.

Either way, Hadoop is the most interesting open source project with which I've been involved, and I hope the increasing attention doesn't distract the community from its primary goal of producing kick-ass code.

Later,
Jeff
What is it? What does it do? Why do I need it?

Having a meta title would be a good start to describing the site.
xmonad is pretty cool, it uses quickcheck for (almost) exhaustive testing of every basic element of the manager, and as I understand it the process of programming new tiling layouts etc is pretty easy.
Thanks, done! It's for anyone that wants to share their workout programs or use others they find.
Drought in VC funding threatening startup innovation?
White House switches to open source codebase
This looks like a basic rails scaffold using nifty-generators. Also there is no validation on any of the forms.
This is why we asked TechCrunch during the summer if they'd please stop saying "Y Combinator's ..." in article titles and instead say something like "YC-funded ..." It is a subtle distinction, but the old titles always made me feel uncomfortable.
For the Lispers out there, I encourage you to try out StumpWM. It's tiling like Xmonad and written in Common Lisp.

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stumpwm

Video: http://www.vimeo.com/1088321
Mommy, Where Do Ideas Come From?
Works fine for me on Windows. Make sure you have

set wildmode=list:longest

in your ~/.vimrc
Yes I used scaffolding to start and tied things together. I want to be a web developer some day. I'll write validations as one of the things I need to do, thanks!
Data By The Numbers: Performance and Failures in Distributed Systems
Found non-US real-estate companies. In Nordic stocks, I found Wihlborgs, Klövern and Citycon that each have yield of over 6%. I now feel I will invest in a mix of these instead of buying a single property myself.
Don't jump in the deep end. Do it in bite-sized lessons. It makes it a lot easier. These are the lessons I used:

http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial...
So he's a hack, why are you reading his stuff? Clearly a love/hate relationship.

If you really want to raise your hack-les, read some Clive Cussler. That guy truly sucks.
Did you read my post? That's why I'm evolving the product: to enable personalized communication.
Grand Theft Video - Blahzay Blahzay- Exclusive interview
The pattern of block quotes tends to degrade comment quality
Voronoi Diagrams – France, Reconstructed from Apparently Inadequate Data
Undefined C is illegal C, because the compiler is not even required to do the same thing from run to run.

Undefined is not the same as implementation defined.
same here. email in profile. thanks!
I am really sorry that it did not work out for you. Sending you an email.
XKCD commemerates GeoCities
so why don't we just declare communism, give everyone a piece of bread and go on with our lives?

unskilled labor is just that, unskilled, I'm suggesting that having someone pay $200K for a college degree and then importing cheap labor because you don't want to pay the salary is bullshit
Although the sound quality is not ideal, here's an archive of his talk on justin.tv: http://www.justin.tv/clip/4df4ad14c58b6ed6
not clear what the goal is. If the goal is to track workouts there are lots of better programs you should look at before expending too much effort on something that isn't significantly different.Hi-Tech trainer comes to mind.
Hot News: Bullshit Metascience Calls Bullshit on Science.

"Odds are, it has." If you're going to call out research as pseudoscience, don't write unvalidated statements like this.
Cool, I'm looking at it right now, thanks! The idea I had was everyone could pool their individual program ideas. Kind of like an open database for workout programs.
Ping seems generally confused about how to discuss commercial support of open source projects, not just Cloudera. Note his reference to "Northscale, parent company of Memcached" is even sillier. AFAIK, the only "parent" I'd think of for memcached, Brad Fitz, is still ensconced at goog.

I've talked to the Northscale guys, sounds like their onto good stuff and I'm not faulting them (just as I wouldn't fault Cloudera), Ping just needs a copy editor.
Overview of type inference in F#
I say "I own a company", exactly because "I have an internet startup" seems like an eye-roller. I agree with the previous comment: the fact that we're out-of-the-ordinary in Chicago is one of the things I like best about Chicago.
A Hacker News member explains PG's own Viaweb to him
I suppose some people need something that beefy but I can't imagine many startups need it their first couple years.

We've gotten by with just a cheap Brother networked laser printer for 3 years. If we need to fax something, we walk a block to the blueprint shop and pay $1
Most professions choose their best practices through a form of natural selection and evolution. Rookies try all the different ways and 30 years later they are Veterans. The Veteran then passes on the best ways he learned to the Rookies, who copy it, and then over the course of their career slowly improve on it as well.

Even the most "simple" task like scaffolding (for instance) has heaps of "craft" in it. What research team decided that scaffolders should thread scaffold clamps between their fingers when they carry them? There is a subtle technique to this that has been passed down through generations.

This is how all professions learn the tricks of their trade. People try stuff, figure out what works best for them personally, and then pass that knowledge down to the rookies. Certainly with programming this happens at university - I've had profs who give practical advice like, "Make sure your program is always capable of compiling throughout the entire dev process." This is folk knowledge yes, but it's practical folk knowledge that HAS been tested over the course of careers by many people.

It is not economical to have many dedicated research scientists trying to figure out these things. They are figured out by people as they do their job.

The most important thing is mentoring. Paul Graham widely shares the things he has learned from experience and those things HAVE been legitimately tested because he has tried ways that failed and tried ways that succeeded. Just because it is not double blind does not mean that it hasn't been tested.
"For almost 100 years now, England has had the most powerful right-to-silence of any country in the world"

No, no, no.

The Criminal Justice Act 1994 (fifteen years ago) essentially removed the blanket right to silence in England and Wales.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_silence_in_England_and...

They even changed the wording of the standard arrest caution. Since 1994 the words "You do not have to say anything" are now followed by a rather ominous "...But..."