skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't decide which part of this is more wrong: the part about science being purely empirical with no theoretical component, or the part about triangles having to have sides of equal lengths.
The biggest incentive I think is the free worldwide shipping if you preordered (at least for me living at the other side of the world)
$66,795. Not bad.
The article begins by distorting a quote from PG (the original passage was about learning in general - or, if anything, about programming - not entrepreneurship), proceeds to contradict itself ("Failed serial entrepreneurs do have a decent second-time success rate"), and ends with pap ("I would argue you should only start a venture because you think it might succeed").
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

From the guidelines
The birth of the giant component (Why staples clump together)
I hope you guys get enough orders to start shipping because I just put in my preorder. Very interesting looking product and chatting with a cofounder at 1 AM is a huge plus.
HN readers are about 7x more likely than the norm to have NT intuitive thinking traits from this poll last week - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943722
Intuitive and perceiving say "right brain" or non-linear thinking to me. The Greeks might have called this function the muse.

What of the non-gifted student? Is he deaf, or is his muse mute?
Upvoted.

Unless you know roughly what the layers of abstraction your app build on are doing, you're going to have a very tough time getting anything done. What better way to learn how compilers work than by writing a throwaway compiler yourself? In the end, you're going to be a better judge of existing tools because you will know, roughly, what they're doing inside that black box.

Of course, for production level code, reinventing the wheel is the worst thing you can do -- unless you can prove that your particular realization of the wheel is better than what already exists.

If people did not reinvent wheels all the time, our wheels would still be round blocks of stone.
Sure on a purely dictionary scale "reinventing the wheel" means to reproduce a tool that exists with little to no extra benefit. More often than not, however it's used to down play the achievements or ideas of others.

I'm the kind of guy who believes that any (even little) benefit is a reason to reinvent something.
Make browser based games easily
You sir get quoted in my blog. Which is just an online journal.
Second iPhone worm behaves like botnet
Sometimes the wheel needs to be reinvented, because, say the old design was patented. Or closed sourced.
They are not yet commonplace, they are still being developed. See this 2005 National Geographic article:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0126_050126_...

I can't seem to find too much details on how it might work other than the fact that it looks at a specific region of DNA that is common between a lot of eukaryotic species.
Have no fear, we are working day and night to bring the ruckus. The list is long.
22:00 and after.

* In a blind-test where guides where shown different pictures than disabled kids; 100% of the time, in 180 tests, the children failed to communicate the pictures they have been shown to the guide. In fact, 100% of results were the images show to the guide!

* The chief evangelist of FC accepts that cases were the children were not even looking at the keyboard were unacceptable and unscientific, but he blamed the guides for being too eager to communicate on behalf of the kids. However, there is plenty of footage of him observing a session where the children were either asleep, looking at the ceiling, or generally not paying any attention. And he made no effort to correct the actions of the guide. Similar practices were also shown of his top aides and students.

* As soon as FC was deployed, there were large scale allegations of child abused, where children were removed from homes and some parents to told to sever all contact with their kids. This prompted one family to inquire about the practices of FC, and after writing to main Autism think-tank in Washington D.C. discovered thousands of similar claims were made in FC sessions. Later tests showed children could not communicate such messages and charges were dropped, but no FC guide was ever charged with wrong doing.

* Millions in public money were spent on FC and an international network of FC practitioners and vendors sprung throughout the U.S.

* A video is shown of the inventor of FC where she is helping a patient choose his fate on whether to stay at home, go to nursing care and other options. The patient is immobile and has a head-mounted pointer where he is choosing the options, and he clearly choose to go into a nursing home. However, when a line is drawn positioning the board, you could clearly see the "guide" ever so slightly moving the board down until the patient makes his "judgment". [This viewer found it curious that the patient was perfectly capable of random movements and jerks, but not accurate slow movement. Not even I can hold a pen so steady with such precision.]

* The final straw was the sight of an autistic kid communicating through a guide, and using this opportunity before a massive audience to attack the opponents of FC and expressed doubts in their academic honesty and their desire to help children!
I think if someone fails to provide a means to automatically build his code after his first year in the profession cannot be considered as competent.

Even if the means is to use an IDE is better than nothing.

For a prototype of 1 or 2 source files, maybe manually compiling everything is still acceptable. After that, the first thing to do is to write a Makefile, or anything like that. It's definitely the highest priority.
DOOM+Heretic+Hexen on AVM2:

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/470460
It would be really cool to see what they could do for those who would like to wake up with their partner. If both could wake up without being groggy, that would be amazing. I'd imagine you might need a bigger window of possible wake up time.
People with longer careers generally have a lot more to say about mistakes, but I tend to find that the advice they give is often very general. I was happy to see that these were much more specific suggestions.
What about throwing exceptions in the finally block? Isn't it an exit point too?

When you call non-trivial 3rd party code from your finally block, how do you ensure it doesn't throw? Or what do you do if it does? Indefinitely nested try blocks?
What she said. What I said was comparatively dumb. Good to see you, Limor.
That's for 2009. For 2010 it'll increment by $2 instead of $1. Why couldn't have I thought of that?
Copy and paste error, and my editing period has long since expired. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust,_but_verify
Sorry about that.
which obviously doesn't work if you don't move enough.

That's interesting, because I suspect I may be one of those. Any idea how many people have that problem and if I can determine upfront whether this product will work for me?
Are Nash Equilibriums Killing Agile Initiatives?
An Evolve-By Date
They could (and should) simply run a proper server like lighttpd or apache. It's not rocket-science.
Web hosting is $6/mo (for a VPS! not shared host)

http://prgmr.com/

Ask any of your friends to give you an account on their servers. If you have a DSL line at home, use DynDNS or similar to run your own boxes from home. Or pay $10/yr for a static IP. (I ran an ISP off of two 56k modems and phone lines FFS)

If all else fails, and you really have a kickass startup idea but can't afford hosting, I will give you a VPS. $20/mo value absolutely free (everything except SMTP; use google apps for that.) no strings attached.

If you have a product with a market more than 10,000 people on earth, you will find a salesperson who is willing to foot the expenses for development, provided you give them a monopoly on distribution. If you're developing a B2B App, I will give you hosting, graphic designer, fax and phone line, but I will need 2 years of exclusive distribution license where I name the price (I will probably charge more than you ever would, but you will get your base fee.)

I had an arrangement with someone where I used their entire office, and all I had to do was keep an eye on their mail server and do spam-fighting; 1 hour a week for a phone line, fax, copier machine, mailing address, water cooler, coffee pot, receptionist, friday donuts, friendship and companionship, you name it (I must say, my friend Greg is an exceptional guy; a hacker turned suit who wanted one of his kind around in an office full of marketing people. He would ultimately teach me so much as to give me the idea for my start up, and I am only venturing out with his blessing. This guy is my brother.)

If you can't find anyone to spot you $20/mo, really, you have bigger problems than software development.
XKCD blows up SkiFree's webpage
http://xkcd.com/667/ and http://ski.ihoc.net/
This is one of those domain-specific areas in which Wolfram is awesome:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum+of+n+from+1+to+365
Yeah, the development of propositions is not really a point of distinction in science. But it was for that reason that I was thinking the author was only contrasting their epistemic value, even though his use of "discover" threatened to undermine that hypothesis.
The thing with Start-ups? They're just starting up...
However, you could also achieve that with one reboot a week. Rebooting every night seems overkill.
Do you have a theory why initial adsense test showed demand but it didn't materialize? What did you learn from this?
WikiLeaks publishing over half a million intercepted pages from 9/11/2001
Don't just roll the dice: A short guide to software pricing [pdf]
The best explanation of Monads I've ever seen
That's not definitive. You should ask a few spirits, using a Ouija board.
topgear always bugs the hell out of me. To see a real racing film:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/79438/on-any-sunday
It's a simple business model - all it requires is an easily explainable idea ("I wear your t-shirt") and enough viral marketing in advance to drive the traffic that will drive the advertisers (ie, those who will pay you to wear their shirt).

I'm sitting on two other niches for basically this business model - planning on moving overseas next year at some stage, though, so will wait until 2011 to implement (by which I mean October 2010 to start marketing).

I'm sure we could all come up with some variants.

Edit: It also helps that it's most attractive to retail / mass consumer products, and that these are most in demand in the holiday season, and that the holiday season coincides with the end of the calendar year, so the most expensive dates are also the most valuable.
Vertical Blinds
Buy cheap and best vertical blinds from online companies. You can buy vertical blinds made up of different materials like wood, aluminum, etc. Buy the one according to your needs and requirements.
Those features have been practically ubiquitous on GSM phones for about five years (except for the cheapest 3rd world models). That's as close to "all phones" as you can get.
The science has been done.

I'm afraid I don't see any citations in that article for studies done specifically on polyphasic sleep. I see citations for the natural length of the human day (24.2 hours), sleep deprivation effects, maximum waking time for humans, etc. But nothing but unbacked, though strongly held, assertions about polyphasic sleep. I may have missed it, but every time the article goes into discussion of polyphasic, it seems to talk around the issue when providing citations, and explicitly to the issue when it is clearly the authors opinion. It has the feel of a religious tract, rather than a scientifically sound article.

I'm not saying the author is wrong. I've never had much luck with polyphasic sleep, as I mentioned above, and I'm certainly not going to argue that it's a great idea without having had any success with it myself or at least having seen good science on the matter. But, if this is the best "science" there is to offer suggesting it does not work, then I don't think I'm convinced.

That said, I'm leaning towards one of the "core sleep plus naps" variants this time around rather than the 6x20 minute routine. I do enjoy sleeping. At least, I seem to, since I do it a lot, and frequently roll over and drift back to sleep in the morning. I also love a couple of cups of jasmine green tea in the morning with breakfast...it's a one to two hour ritual that makes me happy. And a polyphasic schedule would throw all of that for a loop...though I might try kicking caffeine for a while, too. I won't have an Asian market nearby from which to buy my Yamamoto tea, so I probably won't want to drink tea, anyway.

I don't read Pavlina and am unfamiliar with his arguments regarding sleep, so I don't know anything about his results.
Scamville Shakeout: Was Gambit The Right Fall Guy?
> How many OOP languages do you know where type-inference works?

D, C++0x
How to recover emails after shift deleting them in Outlook
Astonishing Programmer Comments on the CRU Climate Model Source Code
We can't all be Gauss but, then again, we're not in fourth grade anymore, either. You can sum over any range trivially: average of the endpoints times length of the range. The average of 1 and 365 is 183. There are 365 elements between 1 and 365 (both inclusive). 183 * 365 = 66795. Yay, right answer.

(There is a formula. I have a poor memory for formulas but am good at transforming English into them, so I just remember the English gloss.)

I'm decently impressed that Wolfram was able to spit out something equivalent to the right formula with only a little massaging of the inputs from me:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum+of+n+from+n%3Da+to+...
Often the time you have to wake up is dictacted by factors out of your control (get to work/lecture/event at a certain time)
It's so easy to do, in fact, that I had already paid before I realized that the device isn't scheduled to ship until 3 days after my daughter is scheduled to ship.

I bet my graphs are going to be REALLY interesting.
Selfhelpwellness - Expressive Wellness Blog - Family's Happiness
Selfhelpwellness blog describes how happy you are. Your family and friends all around you are supportive to bring happiness and kindness to you by any means.
He should ask for $1 the first day, $1.10 the second day (10% more), $1.21 (10% more) the third day... and mathematical illiteracy for Christmas.
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IMO, the biggest thing missing from Haskell is a fast Mutable Map (like Python's).

The current workaround is to use a tree structure with O(log N) lookup time, which is obviously not good.

Yes, I know such a data structure isn't pure, but there are other Mutable objects which are implemented and available.

Perhaps someone should just write a wrapper to a good standalone C/C++ implementation and make it available on Hackage. Would be a huge help.
There's a famous possibly true story about Gauss having to sum the numbers 1 to 100 as a child. Most versions tell it that he noticed that 1 + 100 = 2 + 99 = 3 + 98 and so on, yielding a general formula of n * (n + 1) / 2, so you could probably skip Wolfram for this one. (Explanation: you have n numbers, on average each is equal to the first + the last divided by 2)

Unless you want it for this:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum+of+n+from+1+to+n
So the vaccines are not tested on humans before being distributed in the US, good to know.
Those only work for local declarations where the type of the expression is known.

This thread was talking about type inference in this case ...

var l = [12.4, 13, "a string"];

This would require the array to have generic arguments, and those generics arguments to be inferred from the types given to the constructor (in this case the base class would be Object). I think it works in Scala, but a type unification is really hard ... i.e. to be able to write your own generic functions / classes with the generic type inferred from the base class of the given arguments.

The definition of a generic function that would do this would look like ...

Array<T> createArray<T> (T ... args)

Also, since generic definitions are a PITA to write and read, many people dream of a Hindley-Milner type system where the generic type is discovered. But I don't know of a single OOP language that does that (Ocaml and F# try, but it's ugly) since OOP polymorphism is not compatible.
Definitely not necessarily. Think about machines with many different apps running on them, and pumping out new feautures or more major bug fixes is more important than some minor issue like a memory leak (in who knows which of your apps) that is fixed - and prevents the box from getting in a bad state - with a reboot of the machine. (There could be lots of things, memory leak is just what I have seen mostly lately with the C++ I've been working with.)
Java is not adding local type inference as in C#.
It only adds the diamond construct for inferring the generic types from the variable's type being assigned ...

Map<String, Integer> m = new HashMap<>();

Which is ugly, but many Java developers are taking "programming to an interface" rule quite literally.
Is it truly beneficial to negotiate everything? What about peace of mind?

Negotiation sometimes does not justify the time invested in it. It is also an extra something to occupy space in your consciousness. It might blind you to other considerations, not price-oriented.

That said, a healthy chutzpa is indeed an important skill many people lack.
This article is a member of the template "I am a consultant in X methodology. While X methodology is never wrong, it sometimes fails because of Y. For those of you who don't know what Y is because you did not read the two sentence explanation of it that I did when Malcom Gladwell covered the topic better, it is Insert Wikipedia Definition. This means Non-Sequitur, Semi-Sequitur, and Tangentially Related Thought. X is awesome, please hire me."

Edited to add:

On reflection, that might sound excessively snarky. OK, backing it up: Nash equilibria do not speak to system-wide improvements, at all. The point of the game is that players get their own payoffs rather than getting any value from the sum-of-all-players payoff. The insight from Nash equilibria is that they can't move to a higher payoff for themselves because it requires simultaneous cooperation, which is difficult for some games.

Nash equilibira do not attempt to answer the question "Why do organizations not want to cease to exist?" That isn't a very hard question in game theory -- most players are generally assumed to not desire annihilation. The problem isn't that you're stuck at a Nash equilibrium -- the problem is that an organization does not desire annihilation. Its like doing a game theory analysis of my salary negotiation with my employers and saying "Hmm, Patrick doesn't appear to be taking the negotiation tactic 'Shoot self in head'". That doesn't imply that my employers and I are at a Nash equilibrium, in fact, there could be multiple mutually rewarding paths from our current strategies. Its just that none of them involve me shooting myself in the head.
with all this stuff they could have come up with sleepmate... take care of my sleep hours, hint me that i should sleep and stuff!!!
The problem with that is that it makes anything where you can round up a few votes 'hacker news'. Say, next July, during the Tour de France, I get a few people and vote up cycling articles... does that make them hacker news?
After 6 months of playing WOW, I finally got bored. I looked back at that time and thought, "What could I have accomplished with 6 months of free time?" Learned an instrument? Written an application? Dragged my fat carcass to the gym and lost some weight?

That was early 2005, and I haven't played a video game since (other than some GNUbg and a few hours of Street Fighter IV). I'm not entirely sure I've used my free time as wisely as I could have, but I know I didn't waste it killing boars.
Mr. X By Carl Sagan
Not to mention that there is a lot more that can be done in that space from an engineering perspective. Files syncing could be just the beginning. What about consumer MVC from files to web services? Edit a photo on iphoto and it automatically changes on every service that uses it.

The "data keeper" role is like an octopus, big in the middle, tentacles everywhere. I could imagine a world where that role becomes as important if not more than the OS / services.
Awesome idea, awesome product. Just pre-ordered mine :D
Preaching to the choir. I used it all day for physics homework.
Device Doctor - Free, Fast And Simple Device Driver Updater
Isn't it similar to 43things.com?
I have never really understood the fascination with debuggers. A good log file will allow you to triage any error, even if it's not the one you were looking for. It seems to me that debuggers are mostly for spotting failed assumptions and won't find unreproducable or subtle systemic problems.

I consider the desire to use a debugger a bug in my logging and take corrective action.

Also, you can't grep an execution history in a debugger. I really have no idea how you would spot systemic errors without doing so.

Can anyone who lives by debuggers make a case to convince me to fire up the debugger more often?
INTJ.
I think Dropbox is valuable enough to become ubiquitous but one imagines they need to grow to a certain size before such a feature exactly is rolled into a version of one of the big operating systems. Not that what they've done isn't technically difficult of course, but it just seems like something so valuable it might be on a Chrome wishlist.

Cool thing if the guys who make the software are reading this - started a new job earlier this year at a mostly non-software company managing a few development projects. I doubt most of my colleagues are aware of this startup culture or have heard of .NET much less Y Combinator.

First week "You've got to see this program we have the sales team using, called Dropbox... its tremendous there's about a thousand things we can use it for". Not only are they using it its their "we're showing this off to the new guy" thing.