skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, they wouldn't want to, but they could.

To take his point to a higher level: it would be much more destructive (in several senses) to have to rip out HFS+ for legal reasons than it would be to rip out Xcode.

Lots more people depend on a filesystem.
IKEA is a furniture vendor, not a furniture retailer, furniture consultant, or furniture user. If you are choosing whether to build a business application on top of Microsoft's BizTalk, you are not choosing whether to be Microsoft!
Um. What's there to do in Chambana, apart from driving really fast to Chicago? No offense (I'm sure it really is good to raise a family there), but I've been there a lot, and I have a lot of friends that went there, and the location has been amost universally pointed out as a downside.
Perhaps, and for those who wish to produce the next Windows ME, this is good enough.

But IKEA succeeds because they meet a very broad set of needs very shallowly. The IKEA book shelf will not necessarily be one you can hand down to your children, but it's pretty guaranteed to go well with your Target couch and Walmart dresser.

I'm not interested in competing with the mass producers on their terms.
That's a great argument for moving to a good college town, getting a decent job, and crashing the student group without enrolling. That's what jwz did at CMU, right?
Digg will give you a big spike right away but it fall off the front page so fast that it doesn't last long. Slashdot seems to give you a boost for a whole day.
If that is what you are going for, then yes. There is nothing wrong with that strategy. I haven't found anything remarkable at IKEA (except for price).
It's one reason I don't drink coffee. I hate the smell of bad coffee breath, and if anyone near me has it I find it terribly distracting, and I cannot in good conscience drink coffee knowing that I may subject others to it.
Really? I live in Winnipeg, Canada, and it's pretty much everywhere here. There are bags of it in health stores, granolahead-oriented restaurants, and various other surprising places.
Ask HN: Any designers here in for a rushjob on a fun project ?
I'm busy with something that will hopefully go live tomorrow and make a splash.

One problem is I need a logo and a site design, if anybody here feels like doing something inspired then please let me know.
I'd be interested to hear what some of the successful founders in YC have to say about this one.
Prosperity without Growth Report [pdf]
University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan)

I'm a freshman here at umich. I considered many of those same schools above and was down to WashU and umich in the end. I chose here because the computer science department and engineering school in general is far better, and the size of the school means there are simply amazing resources available.

Even more so, entrepreneurship is HUGE on this campus. I'm doing a web startup right now, and the resources are unbelievable. There's a large community of student web startups ( > 15 in one startup founder group here), a big student entrepreneurship organization (MPowered) that among other things supports startups, and centers for entrepreneurship at both the business and engineering schools that support you with advice and help you get seed money.

As well, with it being a huge school with so many of its programs in the top 10, there's so much going on and so many random people you can talk to. My first few weeks of freshman year, I met with political science, engineering, and informatics professors to talk about my project to get some advice, and all were open to taking some of their time just to chat with a random freshman about his project.

If you want to hear more, send ME an email (NOSPAM == @)
afeldman NOSPAM pamiproductions.com

EDIT: As well, being a big school, there of course is every social group imaginable around, and there are always people around who want to go have fun and others who want to work, and others who want to do both. I know it sounds like it above but I really, really love being here, especially as a web startup founder.
That number for deaths (5,382) is for influenza in general, not H1N1. If you download the referenced source, it states that in 2009 there were less than 300 confirmed h1n1 cases admitted to intensive care worldwide.
You say a lot of quite intelligent things, but you're still taking what I said way too seriously.
Thank you for your feedback, Jacque! I'll change the script accordingly.
great thanks. You would think search might be built in.
Alternate Programming Business Model: Driving Affiliate Traffic With Shareware
Yes. That is what I mean.
Renting out a house is a lot of work and a lot of risk. I have rented out a house to some free loaders and they destroyed my house causing more in damage than they ever paid in rent and causing me a lot of work and hassle. I do not believe renting a house is less risk. It's also a lot of work because you have to find renters, repair the house or find a management agency, etc. Consider that option very carefully.
The above referenced studies point out that the influenza vaccine has not been proven to be more effective than placebo in the elderly, which is one of the groups that CDC thinks it would be immoral to give a placebo.
#1 Rule or programming is: programmers start counting from 0, not from 1.
Yay! thanks a lot!
If you want to found a web service startup, just do it now. There really isn't any reason to wait until after college.

University won't make any difference in that specific goal and will probably slow it down because you'll have lots of classwork to do. In any event, the point of college is really to explore as much of yourself as you can and learn about ideas you would never have on your own. It's entirely likely that 4 years from now Web services will be passe and we'll have moved on to something else. Either that, or in college you'll find something you think is even cooler.
Um, what's wrong with Flanders now? Learning a language is not trivial, and even less so if not via immersion as a child.
The abstract you posted is the same one that I linked to below. This is an NEJM paper from 2008.

The article being discussed in the story at hand is from this week's Lancet. In this week's story, some of the children are no longer legally blind, can play, and can participate in the classroom without visual aids. Some report seeing their parents' faces for the first time. This is a very impressive result, and will be transformative in the lives of these children.
I think in an alternate universe I might have been happy at Berkeley. Good school with lots of computer history (BSD and Tcl just off the top of my head) and a good hacker area. I like the vibe there a bit more than Stanford, too, but that's just me.
Are you limiting yourself to just US universities? If you're open to expand, try Cambridge Uni in the UK.
Being a landlord is a serious responsibility. Don't take it lightly: you're responsible for people's housing.

If I had 200k lying around, I'd start looking at franchise opportunities. Most McDonald's restaurants make more than most software startups (ducks!).
Georgia Tech(Atlanta, Georgia) has a Computational Media program that might be what you are looking for.
Full documentation here: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gwo/commonTasks.h...
I'm sorry, but the heading on table 2 reads:

Table 2. Reported number of new and cumulative confirmed fatal Pandemic (H1N1) 2009
influenza cases in EU and EFTA countries, as 23 October 2009, 09:00 hours CEST, and in the
rest of the world by country, as of 22 October 2009, 16:00 hours CEST.

The total at the bottom of the table is: 5,382

Perhaps you are reading that the total in EU alone is 269?
Does that exist? Sorry, I can't always tell if things are jokes.
Yet there are quantitative metrics for engineers. Is your Ruby on Rails application really more complex than the software flying an airliner?
Chinese govt funding Silicon Valley returnees start-ups
I tend to phrase the question a little more humorously:

Why do bankers have all the money?
GForge - http://gforge.org/gf/
Virtually everyone I meet nowadays tells me they are using some high level framework like Rails, CakePHP, Django with jQuery/Prototype etc. or building on top of Wordpress. Even .net is pretty high level.

So, I'm not sure people are doing what you are saying.
I'd say it can be simplified even further:

THINK before you SOLVE.

A natural tendency for programmers/developers is to move towards a knee-jerk reaction of "I'll just start coding this". It's not that good solutions don't come up from that line of thinking; it's more that - as cyman states - there are faster ways to accomplish results if you simply think about how you're going to solve the real problem(s).

Once a problem is analysed and broken down into it's appropriate tasks/needs/requirements, sometimes a credit card solves the problem faster (and better).

Oh, and when you purchase solutions, you typically can investigate APIs and system requirements beforehand. Even after purchase, most reliable solution vendors offer support/money back guarantees.
Currency is like stock in a nation. We always talk about the falling dollar, but what we are really talking about is the decline of the American empire; decline of trust, decline of confidence, decline of a prosperous future, decline of value for the world created from within America and exported to other nations.

Our economy for the past decade or so has been directed internally. We are only thinking of ourselves. We are building guns for our wars and no butter for our neighbors. We are spending millions and billions of dollars on entertainment in the form of sports stadiums and franchises that only americans care about. We are not spending money on education for our creative future generations who will find and solve problems for the world.

We are not talking about a decline in the dollar, we are talking about a decline in the faith that those who control the value of the dollar are acting in the best interest of the nation over the best interest of a relative few who provide no value to anyone but themselves and their close friends.
> that some dinosaurs insist on 20-year-old languages

That would not be so much of a problem. Scheme is certainly older than 20 years, now. Python comes close.
Cambridge University is certainly a wonderful university, and studying at a university in a different country from the country in which one grew up has additional educational advantages. But would a United States student be able to afford to study at Cambridge, if the main issue in shopping for local universities is cost?
Hacker Dojo http://hackerdojo.com
Making people not use something that is proven to prevent death and injury is unethical.

Making people not use something that is _not_ proven to prevent death and injury is _not_ unethical.

None of your examples for unethical procedures have any similarity with that second situation. The syphilis sufferers were not treated with penicillin even though it was proven to be effective. The nazis used prisoners, not well informed volunteers.

And your car accident analogy involves making people have accidents that they would not otherwise have, not using preventive measures proven to work. We're not talking about infecting people with the flu, are we?
sure there is. mine is: automatically assume that every user is out to hack/deface/fuck with your app.
What if one of the applicant's concerns is finding a capable co-founder, ideally one with a complementary skill set?
There is no point buying-to-rent if you already rent unless you either live in a city where it's arguably cheaper to rent than buy (SF is an example) or u don't want to settle.

Buying to live in is always the best return because you have no renters to deal with and what used to go on rent now partly goes on capital.

If u don't want to buy a place, a portfolio of managed funds, perhaps some individual stocks and also bonds/commodities would be a good mix.

But $200k is a lot of money and its what financial advisers are for. You would gain a lot from going to see an independent financial advisor and paying him $500-$1000 to create a long term plan for you -- which might include tax efficient schemes like putting some of this into a 401(k) etc.

On the issue of investing in website: as tech people it's something we all know and it's therefore attractive. However it's unlikely u'd get attractive terms investing in a proven business and going down the venture/angel route is very risky and usually pursued by people with a much bigger personal wealth. Its also easy to get sucked into spending more time than u intended on these investments because its your profession - which then reduces your return because you are essentially "working".
Keep in mind there is always overhead. There's no such thing as a cash machine that requires no maintenance.

I'd look at high dividend yield stock that pays out monthly (6% yield or more). This will give you monthly income with minor hassles, since the companies are large. Unless you are a fantastic investor, don't look for capital gains (making money off stock price increases) because there's lots of speculation:
http://simoniqe.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/how-to-not-lose-mon...

Domestic oil pipeline companies are a good bet because they pay high dividends and are stable in price since they get paid no matter what. Investing in oil is an ethical dilemma but there are domestic oil companies that are better. PIF.UN is an example of a domestic Canadian one that pays about 10% monthly dividends with no hassles, but if in the US you must never trade in other currencies. Preferred stock also provides a stable price and in this economy you can easily get 10% or more monthly div's. Investigate DDR.PR.G or other Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) if you like the real estate angel. Be careful if the yield is above 12% because it could be that the stock's price is falling, which inflates the yield %. I AM NOT A CERTIFIED INVESTOR. I AM A STUPID PROGRAMMER WHO FOUND THESE STOCKS IN IDLE TIME. DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH BEFORE BUYING!

A great resource is Stock Chase:
http://www.stockchase.com/
It's like a Twitter but only from professional investors.

Both real estate and web acquisitions have little daily work but are very interruptive. You have leaks, storms, tenants causing problems and for the web, downtime events or security updates that often the need attention of an owner at 3 AM at night.

"I could imagine for example buying existing web sites that have proven ad revenue"
I've gotten burned bad on small website acquisitions. There is full time work involved for many months in terms of at least ensuring the acquisition is worthwhile, and often without dedicating workers full time to deal with it, things go south. Owners claim they do little work to maintain it and this is generally false.
You can model a surprising amount of rules with a good type system. Though not all.
They are right that there are cheaper ways to cool the planet. However I believe that they are seriously misjudging the costs of excess CO2. For instance they barely mentioned that excess CO2 results in ocean acidification. How important is that? Well for a start we're threatening the survival of every animal that depends on calcium carbonate shells (think corals and shellfish), and then threatening the rest of the ecosystem within which they live.

Injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to cool us down (and create more acid rain) helps our temperature, but doesn't help with the next pollution disaster. Or the one after that.

Spending about 2% of current world domestic product on CO2 mitigation seems perfectly justifiable to me.
I'd say that if you're buying an off the shelf program, it's likely because implementing it would take FAR longer than the (example) 3 hours to investigate their proprietary API.

I think there is still a valid trade-off in purchasing - it just has to make sense, is all. If the problem is big enough that it's unwieldy enough (ie. take too long to develop and TEST internally), then it definitely makes sense to investigate 3rd party options.

That said, developing internally is sometimes the only answer: when you don't get a good feeling from the 3rd party options (based on research), when the 3rd party cost is too high, etc.

Of course... it's usually more fun to develop internally. :)
You will spend much more than 10 hours per year unless things go spectacularly well.

I was a landlord for a few years: I rented out a single family house in a nice suburb and I had great tenants and positive cashflow from day one! Even so, you still want to go by the place periodically to make sure it's still standing (you can write off the gas/expenses for this since it's business-related travel!). You have to collect rent and make sure the checks don't bounce. I like money in hand, so I don't want checks mailed to me. You need to file paperwork in some cities for annual rental property registration, need to keep records for taxes, there may be some repairs needed. At the very least you'll need to make sure the repairs are done right.

Easily way more than 10 hours/year. I had a friend who both worked for a property management co and who rented out houses for years. His feeling was that unless you had multiple properties, paying the company wasn't worth the lost revenue.

The biggest risk is having a renter who not only doesn't pay, but trashes the place on his way out and has no assets you can get in a lawsuit. It happens, but you can minimize your exposure. In any event, renting property is not something to be entered in to lightly. Don't do it if you heart isn't in it.
Mixing in a bunch of other non-related "off the shelf" code can lead to unmaintainable code, licensing issues, poor performance, unexplained behavior, missing documentation, inherited bugs, and not being able to modify a library to your own needs. I would hate to be part of a project that adopted this philosophy. Constantly reinventing the wheel is not good either. Finding the right mix of knowing when to leverage existing code and when to write your own is when you win.
I look at Google and think they have a strong academic culture. Elegant solutions to complex problems. We pride ourselves on strong hacker culture, building things quickly for lots of people.

I wouldn't mind working at Facebook.
Iphone appstore SEO - how to improve your app ranking
Using which Pythonic stable, tested, documented drag-n-drop GUI/RAD toolkit?
You might want to take off those rose-colored glasses and take a better look at Apple. The classic Mac OS existed until 2001 and still lacked memory protection -- You had to remember to save your work before opening Netscape! Then they didn't even develop their own OS, but instead purchased NextSTEP which was already 12 years old at the time and circling the drain. Then, instead of throwing out the old stuff, they bolted the Carbon API onto it to allow classic Mac applications to be ported easily. So you really couldn't be more wrong about Apple.

On the other hand, the number of applications that Mac OS X must run to be accepted can be counted on the collective hands of the OS X engineers. They can almost afford to break whatever they want as long Photoshop runs. Microsoft does not have that luxury.

The command line vs. GUI argument doesn't hold water either. Instead we're comparing the desktop metaphor with some concept that doesn't exist yet. Operating system research is always on going and the really good ideas percolate up into all the current operating systems. You can't just radically change direction -- even Apple knows that. In fact, they've been removing features (like creator codes) that distinguished them from Windows and Linux basically because being compatible with the universe is more important than being innovative.
I freely admit that I have no idea how to measure productivity. And until I do, I really can't tell you that what I choose to do is anything other than consistent with my superstitions about software development.

In other words, I choose some superstitions and I can build up a consistent kind of world based on those superstitions and I can test various ideas to see if the ideas are consistent with my superstitions or the logical consequences of those superstitions.

But really, I have no idea whether I'm directing development traffic or whether I have a pair of coconuts clamped to my ears and I'm waving palm fronds under an empty sky.

http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-02-1...
You have to enlighten me how it could be a different physical server and yet be the same hard drive ?

Unless you are suggesting they use ATA-over-ethernet or something like that to share the same drive.

Or maybe you meant to be worried that they might use virtual machines where one is running the .gov site and the other would be mail server or something like that ?

At the volumes of web traffic they receive there it would surprise me if they only had one server to do just whitehouse.gov, especially if they're using drupal.
There are metrics for problems which are studied in-depth before engineers are let loose to solve it. That's not true of most software projects.
You mentioned in the comments you wanted to tour businesses...

...and I can second that businesses like the Googleplex and Apple HQ sound interesting but they're pretty boring cube farms.

If you know someone who works at one of the companies ask if u can have lunch with them at Apple or Google's cafes - pretty cool. But don't expect to get a tour of the offices (cube farms) - most companies are highly secretive of their workplaces and employees are not allowed to give grand tours.

Googleplex is more interesting when they have events but they tend to do that less now.

For startups, for me more interesting things are happening in The City (San Francisco). Take a trip up here and hang out in SoMa - many startup people hang out in cafes like Centro, Epicenter, Ritual Roasters, Maxfields, etc.

Check upcoming and facebook for events that might be going on, but Monday is a quiet day usually.
I also think that the "use a third party library" mentality can, but not always, cripple programmers.

I've almost always written something that has less features/worse code/more bugs than a library that would have been a perfect fit. And I did it intentionally.

Why?

Because I learned something new. I've written my own C++ DirectX game library... then went out and used HGE/Goblin 2D. It made me a better programmer because I understood why the design decisions were made because I had similar problems when doing it myself.

I've written my own PHP framework. Why? Same freaking reason. I can look at similar frameworks, CakePHP/Django and quite literally see what it was they were doing under the covers without looking at the source because I've solved the same problem myself.

In the event that there isn't a third party library out there that does what you want, the programmer who is accustomed to look for those first will be screwed. They've never had to make a large system by themselves and they don't understand ahead of time what types of problems they'll run into because they've used other frameworks that have prevented them from making those mistakes.

tl;dr; Using a framework just because its there is similar to a parent coddling a child. When its time to enter the real world they simply won't be ready.

The anecdote here, I believe, is knowing when doing it yourself is a great learning experience, vs a COMPLETE waste of time. Always doing it yourself is stupid, but never doing it yourself is the easy way out.
I saw "Deep Water" earlier this year. While I sympathize with the stresses that drove him in that direction, I honestly can't understand why Crowhurst ultimately did what he did.
Yeah. The White House's cybersecurity experts. That should be pretty awesome.