skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: Palo Alto Hacker House has an opening
Rent: $535/ month for a single, private room

Within walking distance of:
University Ave (numerous bars, coffee shops, stores, facebook's hq)
Palo Alto caltrain
Stanford University (long walk - you'd probably want to bike)

Plenty of parking (private driveway & street parking)
INTERNET: 30mb down / 9mb up (w00t!!!!!.1!!.)
Gigabit wired network / Wireless B/G/N network
NetFlix subscription with unlimited movie streaming
Numerous desks (there's space for at least 6 in the main area)

Companies represented by tenants: Facebook, Heyzap, Redwood Systems, Sprowtt, SLAC, stealth startup, and a Stanford student.

If you're entrepreneurially minded, then you'll fit right in!

Available for move-in Dec 1st.

Email me at dwynings187@gmail.com if you're interested and tell me a little about yourself.
Compare the reconstructed temperatures to recorded instrumental temperatures and/or cross-check the tree ring reconstructions with reconstructions from other proxies.
I'm an ocaml fan, and I agree with some of the complaints, but mostly the last section. The article should've started with that.
Very good points,

I suspect that programming and other forms of concentrated work will require a phase shift in order to continue a high level of productivity, and the type of productivity won't be the same.

But, as DHH of 37signals points out, people don't typically use their hours well anyway. If raising a child left only two hours a day to work, that's still 10 hours during the week -- as much time as DHH spent coding basecamp and rails his first year. If you add to that time you can spend planning, communicating, and thinking about the problem (to fill the time when you're more likely to be interrupted) you can optimize those few hours even further.

So far as I can tell, this is the pattern my mother used while she was caring for me and working her way through journalism school. I had colic. But she'd do her interviews in the intervening time, and she'd collect all the information she needed, and wrote fragments she wanted to include. When she got the chance, she sat down and wrote the whole article in a single sitting.

PS: Thanks for being part of this community. I started to read your comment page, and you've contributed many wonderful insights I've had to copy to remember for later :-)
You've been hacked. Now what?
If you've got those, then you're Turing-complete. I think that qualifies as more than an S-expression reader.
The main thing that you might not have at your fingertips is basic abstract algebra (groups, rings, fields). I'm assuming you know ODE, PDE, linear algebra and other things from an engineering centric education.
Try cycling the display modes with 'm'. There is a mode that displays the URLs. I usually just copy/paste it. I can't open them in a browser because I run this program on another computer via a ssh session, therefore I have not yet implemented this feature.

Sometimes the URLs are too long, though. Then I have to navigate to hacker news. The same if I want to comment.
FWIW, F# has "using". Between "using" and IDispose, you've got all the resource-unlocking, unwinding, and rollbacks you'd ever want.

I think this article makes it very clear how having a huge existing set of libraries can really put a language into warp drive, whereas not having one means you are going to spend some time re-inventing the wheel. (But even in straight Ocaml, I fail to see the problem)
I got that impression with go a bit. It did feel like there were a couple of things omitted from the language simply because the authors had never experienced them done correctly.

Exceptions always comes up as the big one, but the more subtle part of a concurrent system that erlang did really well was allow you to monitor processes for crash. You can abort a goroutine early, but nobody can hear about it.

Of course, you can also segfault the thing using a null pointer dereference, but you can't do anything other than have your entire application fail.
Dave and I (along with a classmate Dom) won the Chicago Booth (MBA) business plan competition for Bump before entering YC. It was good because we were in school and got credit for spending time thinking about and working on Bump (rather than taking a class that was wholly distracting this one was only partially distracting), met some alumni that have become valuable advisors, and greatly improved our presentation skills (which helped a lot when we were raising money). It was bad because we knew had to work on two things in parallel 1) the real business and 2) the "business plan" business (if we had said what we really wanted to say we would not have won that competition, which at the end of the day is what it was). Overall it was net positive for us I think because priority #1 was the real business and we made instead of planned (we started on Bump 7 months before the competition and launched before it started). In fact, the top 2 companies were the only two that had product in market at the finals. When my Booth ex-colleagues ask me for advice in the business plan competition I tell them to build a product and get in in customers hands, otherwise you are spending too much time guessing what customers will think.

There are plenty of companies that came out of business plan competitions that have done really well. One of my favorites is SunEdison that won the HBS business plan competition. A few years after winning they were just bought for $200M. Not bad...
I had a very similar thought. Programming is very enjoyable in the same way that puzzle solving is. There are millions of people out there who enjoy puzzles, evidenced by the popularity of Sudoku and those Nintendo DS "brain games". If you put the two together, you end up with millions of housewives programming.

New book from O'Reilly: Hacking for Housewives.
Warning, this page seems to invoke the print dialog in the browser.
It doesn't matter much, but it's a nice and very obvious way of saying "you should run this". You clone the repository, type ls, see one file green, and you can instantly run it, without reading the doc, or guessing.
How is design not art?
I have to ask, I know ideas aren't worth anything until you execute, but doesn't throwing your idea in front of a large audience of other entrepreneurs and industry leaders potentially lead to a lot of extra competition? This sounds really cool to me, but I'm a bit hesitant. I like getting feedback, but usually from people I can trust (which I know is a biased sample).
There are some good free resources, like this one:

http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/finengineer/

But there's probably also lots of information available on your intranet - there's bound to be a wiki with some good information. And if your company subscribes to the ISDA library (about £11k pa) you can get a userid & dig out stuff there. What I found most useful was to get a copy of trade confirms & read them until I understood - plus copy some modelling spreadsheets & tinker with the inputs to see what effect they have on the outputs. For really heavy financial maths subscribe (for free) to Willmott & search around there. Good luck.
Something I'd like to know is what languages they've used in the past few years. When Pike answered the question, he mentioned a bunch of dead research languages. He said that Ken Thompson was influenced by B, but I highly doubt that he's written any B code in the past 30 years.

Go's overarching principle is "to reduce the amount of typing" and "reduce clutter and complexity", but if you switch from something like python or ruby to go, you'll quickly notice there's a lot more typing and complexity for programs. Especially when it comes to stuff like type declarations and error handling.
"Allen Barra writes about sports for the Wall Street Journal".

Oh, ok.
Study the advice of Charlie Munger: http://tinyurl.com/ycmpo9v
Yeah I get this feeling a lot. If you're working with formats like json and yaml, there really isn't an adequate way to represent those formats in Go (something as natural as python dictionaries or ruby hashes)
Aren't they two entirely different formats? In one, you're asking probing questions but it's a small group setting and with your longtime partners. In the other you're in front of an audience and judging with folks you may or may not know. You've also screened the applicants for YC for ideas you'll want to probe deeply whereas the contest seems more about general business models and fit to markets. You'll invest your money just based on one meeting whereas the contests seem more like a chance to simply get a second meeting. It's the difference between rational dissections in YC versus blink assessments in the competitions. I don't see very many parallels, actually.

In general, prizes awarded by judges in contests are not a very good predictor.

Do you know of specific data here or is this your general impression? Some contest winners and close losers have seemed very impressive to me. And that's not just at TC50 but also from the DFJ and MIT competitions too.
While it was not a private equity firm, a trading company called Chicago Research and Trading would interview people more than 20 times more often than not.
> You are only paying for the shipping and handling.

Yes but during checkout what they don't tell you is the default is to charge you $290 more and this expensive line item isn't opt-in, it's opt-out.
And for all the understanding the author has of design, none of it stops his website feeling lopsided and cramped.

I really think that interface design and user experience design are very different animals than plain 'ole graphic design. None of them are more important than the others, but they should definitely all be considered together...
I don't know what you're trying to argue. Tree rings underestimate current, not historical, temperatures. This means that, yes, if you calibrate to current temperature, the past will look comparatively hotter. This is a causal relationship.
Have you read Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom?" I think you'd like it.
Thanks for catching that. I looked but couldn't find that notice (I'll admit I didn't look super hard...)

I think that if you're going to charge a customer X number of dollars, you really need to make sure they understand that. It's obviously a bad business practice, but I think that regulators should take the extra step and make hiding charges in fine print illegal...
Pragmatic BDD for .NET: SpecFlow 1.2.0 released.
SpecFlow is a BDD tool for .NET that enables to bind business readable behavior specifications to the underlying implementation.
SpecFlow provides a pragmatic and frictionless approach to Acceptance Test Driven Development and Behavior Driven Development for .NET projects today.
SpecFlow 1.2.0 includes a new commandline tool and support for VisualStudio 2010.
Five Rules for Writing Good Code
Hi Ryan, I actually did point that out towards the end of the post. My problem is not with the ideas per se, but with the way people treat them in general. Most people equate lean startups with bootstrapping in the startup blogging world.
Ask HN and PG - Justin.tv Question?
How does Justin.tv get by still with so many people broadcasting pirated and copyrighted material? How have they not been shut down ie. Napster?
Rich. I tried to distinguish between the ideas behind lean startups and the common perceptions of lean startups as portrayed in most startup blogs. It is the latter I was attacking, which is why I qualified the post at the end.
Design Explorations by 37signals
argument #1 : "OCaml sucks because it is not LISP".
argument #2 : "OCaml sucks because it is not LISP".
...

Oh, and seriously? This one is good for a chuckle. I am convinced that it's an instance of the pattern above. I don't know what version of LISP that does this the author has in mind, but it's not the 50s any more -- we no longer leave batch jobs on punchcards at the computer in the morning to obtain the results in the evening. I would hate if my compiler spat so many errors that the initial, and only pertinent one, scrolled out of the screen:

"Compiler stops after the first error:

Compiler should process the whole compilation unit (normally, a file) unless a total disaster strikes. E.g., if an expression has the wrong type, just assume the type is right and proceed to the next expression. You do not have to generate the executable, just report as many errors as possible!"
At what other periods to tree rings not correctly correlate to temperature? How do we know the last 50 years is the only time this has happened?

Since we do not know why the temperature has not correctly correlated over the last 50s years, we can't really know when else that has been the case, can we?

So why do we rely on tree rings for any period?

They are proven to be unreliable over a signifcant period, and we don't know if or how often that's also true of the past.
The likelihood of news jobs going overseas aside, I would enjoy a more global flavor to news in the United States. I often find the BBC's take on current events illuminating, and I'd be interested in quality coverage from other parts of the globe.
Mz, actually, Backupify is still going strong. This wasn't a "where we went wrong" post. It was a "we built too short-sighted" post and now scaling is painful.
Save the planet Use less, enjoy more, leave something for the next to come
On OS X at least, you could shell out to the open command and pass in the url.
Excellent point. What we found is that the risk with Backupify is technology risk.
"many scientists disagree strongly about Climate Change."

I think many misrepresents the level of conflict. There are plenty of people that think man made impact on Climate is negligible. However, most people with a strong and relevant scientific background acknowledge, the heat island effect around city's and or desertification which are less controversial man made impacts on local Climate.

CO2's absorption spectrum is different than other atmospheric gasses and it's low over all percentage in the atmosphere magnifies it's importance. And there is little debate over the quantity of CO2 released by human activity's. But, quantifying the effect of CO2's impact on global climate with high precision is hard, so there is debate about the magnitude of it's impact.
I think the main kudos should go to Arrington, since it is basically his personal fight with scammers - WP only syndicates Techcrunch articles. I'd say Michael has an advantage that he is a lawyer, so he knows the boundary of what he can and can't write, so it is hard to intimidate him with letters from companies lawyers.
A lot of Art boffins claim that to be Art it must not have any useful serving function. By rule, design is built around rules and is useful to the user by making browsing easier.
Hi Patio,
As an example problem (I wrote the original post), we strongly suspected users wanted encryption of their backed up data. But when we talked with initial customers, there were certain things they wanted more that, when built, made encryption a slower, more difficult process to implement. We punted on encryption because, for the first 3 months we were in the market, there was a little demand, but not much. Then as we hit more mainstream blogs and publications and got a wider user base, encryption shot to the top of our list. So what we learned is that our first 500 customers weren't very representative of who would ultimately use the product and we shouldn't have catered to them so much. We really should have paid less attention to early customers, and more attention to related markets like PC backup, and assumed they had already figured out what the market wanted.
This has been tried with tech support. A lot of companies that did this have since moved call centres back to North America. Why? Because the customers revolted.

So the only thing this will achieve is to speed the death of the newspaper. Instead of differentiating themselves from all the spamblogs out there they seek to join them. They seem to not understand that the only purpose of those is to game Google rankings, which don't exist on paper.
(Not affiliated with either party, but here's my take)

Simple: clear fair use, and responsiveness to takedown requests.

Take NFL games as an example:

At any given time you can probably find a channel showing any NFL game, but you won't be able to find one that lasts the whole broadcast. That means they're pulling copyrighted content in < 3 hours, which is pretty damn good.

Simultaneously, you can find lots of UGC that isn't pirated on justin.tv (i.e., the site exists for more than piracy).
Click&Clean 3.6.0.0 (Chrome extension)
Clear private data on exit.
They are used in the next version, see http://di2.nu/foia/harris-tree/briffa_sep98_e.pro (promoted from a comment by jgrahamc on his blog which I would think should get added to his main blog post).
Latest DVB-S-S2 transponder updates 11-28-2009
I used a DreamHost private server for a while. The first thing to be aware of is that it's not as easy to configure from the group up as a true VPS. Their private server systems give you the ability to customize the setup, but not as extensively as as SliceHost or Linode. Also, DreamHost's private server offerings are not any cheaper than SliceHost or Linode. You need a standard account + a private server package (starts at $15) and probably a private server MySQL package (another $15).

That said, I think that DreamHost has a good offering - nice big quotas, pretty good support - but for someone who needs a very customizable environment for something like Rails or Django, you're better off with a true VPS.
Anyone else confused by this opening statement: "Python 3 has been out for about a year at this point, and so far Django hasn't really started to move towards it (at least at a first glance). However, Django has already begun the long process towards moving to Python 3[...]"?
Also -- also take a look at the RaceSpace Cloud Servers offering. A similar VPS offering to SliceHost that may be a little cheaper, depending on how much bandwidth you end up using (SliceHost packages in 100 GB of bandwidth, you pay per use with RaceSpace Cloud Servers). Other than that, very comparable packages.
Critical mistakes freelancers make
Not to mention the homepage of his website doesn't render correctly for me on Chrome with a 1024px wide screen.
It is more accurate to say that Rand hate anything that is not her own views. She also hate anarcho-capitalists, libertarians who are not randians, anti-intellectual property libertarians, and anybody who are more extreme and consistent than her.

She isn't some wicked witch for capitalism. She have her own kingdom.
To be fair, most compilers do continue on in an attempt to fund further errors, and this is useful. The key is doing so in a way that keeps the errors pertinent. See the first few chapters of Programming Language Pragmatics for some discussion of this.
I'm going to upvote them all to make them feel welcome.
As far as I can tell, you do that yourself. You seamlessly switch from talking about Customer Development to lean startups to bootstrapping, as if you don't see the difference between them.

For example:

Since no one ever talks about the down side of the customer development approach...

...Capital is required to grow. I’m not aware of any $100 million companies built with a lean startup mindset...

...So if you can’t attract a lot of capital to your idea, one possible reason is that your idea sucks.

Sorry, but I really don't see the point you're trying to make.
Do not confuse groupthink with analysis.

Simply because a heckuva lot of smart people have studied an issue for decades does not mean -- at all -- that somehow they have made more progress than some schmuck reading about all of this for the first time in Newsweek. You do not get a free pass by being smart and asking a lot of questions.

(A side note: I find among academia the meme that somehow intelligence, hard work, and admiration of peers equates to progress. These are all great traits to have, but in themselves they don't automatically translate into solid value for posterity. In fact, in some fields there may actually be an inverse relationship)

Having said that, you are absolutely correct in saying that you should ask questions first. There's no point in getting everybody on the defensive.

But if the reply is "Look -- it's all very complicated, and we've thought about it a lot and we're way ahead of you here and this is the best plausible way to settle several internal arguments... etc, etc" then you have not received an adequate answer.

I applaud your appeal to being inquisitive and polite. I find your defense of this particular case, however, sorely lacking.
Does this really belong on HN?

As a sidenote, why is it okay to quote Nietze (who died in a mental hospital) whilst wearing a Che Guevera T-shirt yet it is wrong to say anything about Rand?

Does the author’s personal life have any bearing on his argument?

(Btw, my favourite writer was on death row and second favourite was addicted to morphine and shot his brains out. This does not detract any of their works – on the contrary, it makes it more interesting).
Do you really think this is aggressive and elitist? I found the delivery to be straightforward.
I have to disappoint you - I played original Quake on Pentium 133 running at 38fps, software rendering, without any glitches.

As far as I remember - not many things were running slow at that time - it was either you had the hardware to run stuff, or not.
My bad. That's not the quote, but I should have been more specific and quoted something other than a YC comment I vaguely remembered.
So are magazines. If you don't opt out they keep sending you stuff and bill you. But that initial charge is for purchasing the trial. If you don't cancel, you get billed. Not satisfied, you get a refund. This is pretty common, and not all are necessarily scams.
I dinged u because it's very likely that as a designer he most likely uses a Mac, for which Chrome does not exist:

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/mac.html
That article misses the boat.

American cultural exports aren't popular because of some Ten Year Plan by the government to promote them.

They're popular because they've found things that appeal to a large number of people, and because they represent the culture of the United States, which is still has (if somewhat tarnished) the appeal of anyone, from any background, being able to "make it".

I don't see China competing in this "race" at all, to be honest. A culture rooted in extreme nationalism and glorification of the past, what is attractive about it to anyone who doesn't happen to be Han Chinese?

India, on the other hand, has a lot more to offer, in my opinion again, but if the popularity of Bollywood movies and music are any indication..
The Daily Beast is one of the most dubious sources that isn't banned here on HN. I thought the article in The Economist on the same person was much more interesting.

http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=146...
I strongly suspect you're right. The same is true for tennis grand slams. Watching the last few tournament stages is practically impossible, streams are shut down within minutes. Oh, and the infuriating "max number of viewers for your country reached" message. Not that you can watch it anywhere else for love nor money.
What is affordance?
Um, I was just in Japan and streets definitely have names. For example, this is in Nagasaki:

http://flownet.com/ron/fukken_street.jpg
Mac version of Chrome, from the very page you linked to:

"An early developer channel version is now available! While it's not at beta quality, it is coming along nicely. If you want to try it right now, see Early Access Release Channels for download instructions."

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/eula_dev.html?dl=mac
From Wikipedia:

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

It's always worthwhile doing a little research...